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72 Hour Open House A good friend of mine, Vancouver REALTOR Kye Grace, is holding a 72 hour open house in Gastown this weekend. Armed with his laptop, Kye will be streaming Vancouver's first 72 hour open house via a Ustream video broadcast available @ 72 Hr Open House Video Feed. The property, located @ #21, 120 Powell Street, is a Heritage loft in the Pilkington House, which was built in 1910 and was a Glass Warehouse for the Pilkington Glass Company until 1950. The building was converted to... Read Full Post

Gates, Buffett Visit Oilsands Warren Buffett & Bill Gates, who are the first & third richest men on the planet, visited the Horizon oil sands project near Fort McMurray on Monday. The pair, worth an estimated $120-billion combined, quietly flew into the Alberta resource town as guests of Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO) and were given a private tour of the massive $9.3-billion CDN project. CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, was asked to give the two tycoons an o... Read Full Post

New federal laws and regulations dealing with money laundering and anti-terrorist financing that went into effect on June 23, 2008 will require real estate associates and brokers to collect and verify more personal information from buyers and sellers. Real estate associates must also now track the source of funds received during the course of a real estate transaction, such as the deposit. These new regulations are part of federal legislation (Bill C-25) passed in 2007 that requires a number ... Read Full Post

(May 11, 2008) EnCana Corporation announced this morning their intention to split the company into two separate energy companies: one a natural gas company with an outstanding portfolio of early life, North American, natural gas resource plays (GasCo) the other a fully integrated oil company with industry-leading in-situ oilsands properties and top-performing refineries, as well as an underlying foundation of reliable oil and gas resource plays (IntegratedOilCo or IOCo) Under the proposed tra... Read Full Post

Bank of Canada Cuts Overnight Rate (Tuesday April 22, 2008) - The Bank of Canada cut the overnight rate by 50 basis points this morning, bringing the target rate to 3.00%. The overnight rate is the rate at which major participants in the money markets borrow and lend one-day funds to each other. This is the second 50 bps rate cut in a row, and marks the first time since the 2001 US recession that the Bank has cut rates by a full percentage point in just six weeks time. In their communiqué, t... Read Full Post

Crude Oil Hits $100/bbl History was made on February 19, 2008 as NYMEX Crude Oil closed above $100 per barrel for the first time in history. While crude oil futures had traded above $100/bbl twice before earlier in this year, today marked the first day the futures contract actually closed the day above the $100/bbl mark. The front-month (March '08) contract for west Texas light crude oil was up $4.51 to close at $100.01 per barrel. OPEC To Cut Production? Today's run-up came after comments by... Read Full Post

Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World Contest The Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest has now gone viral - webmasters and bloggers around the world have joined the competition to be awarded the coveted "Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World" award. The phrase "Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World" currently shows 956,000 results when doing a search for the term on Google (see Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World). We now invite all REALTORs (and their webmasters) to show... Read Full Post

Alberta Oilsands Sales Drop (February 12, 2008) Sales of Alberta oilsands leases and licenses are down dramatically this year as compared with the same time the past two years. Results from last weeks sales saw only $150,000 worth of oilsand leases sold, the lowest amount generated in over two years. To date in 2008, oilsand landsales have generated the province of Alberta only $25-million, versus $138-million the same time last year and over $846-million the same time in 2006. Peter Tertzaki... Read Full Post

Power Cut To South Calgary (Feb 11, 2008) Power is off in most of South Calgary this morning as Enmax crews attempt to diagnose the cause of the disruption. There was a minor power bump around 7:15 this morning due to an outage in a single substation near the SE community of Douglasdale, but a cascading failure at 10:15 took an additional 5 substations offline. Enmax crews are working on the problem and hope to have power restored before 1PM today. Let's hope that's the case, as even though i... Read Full Post

Interest Rates Will Continue to Drop (February 05, 2008) Since August 2007 the Fed cut rates by no less than 225 basis points. This is the most aggressive easing since the early 1980s when the Fed was targeting money supply growth and not inflation. But the market is expecting more. Note that the bond market is already pricing in a recession. And in every recession the inflation-adjusted fed funds rate was negative. Today at 3%, the fed funds rate is about one percentage point above inflation... Read Full Post