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 6 loft units on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors and one large office space on the ground level in 1993. The building has a rich history as a glass factory where many of Vancouver's classic building's windows were built including the windows in the original St. Pauls…

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 overview of the conventional and oil sands industry.

Buffett Considers Additional Oilsands Investment?

Buffett has invested in large oil sands holdings with ConocoPhillips which is a joint…

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 of industries, including real estate, to do more to help stop money laundering and terrorist financing. The regulations are enforced by the federal agency known as the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC.

REALTORS will be…

(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 transaction, expected to be completed in early 2009, EnCana common shareholders will receive one share in each of GasCo and IOCo in exchange for each EnCana share held. Dividends from each of the operating companies are expected to total the quarterly…

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, the Bank notes that “buoyant growth in domestic demand…has been substantially offset by the fall in net exports.” Due to a “deeper and more protracted slowdown in the U.S. economy,” this drag from trade is expected to remain. And, in spite of financial conditions…

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 the Iranian oil minister suggesting it was normal for OPEC to cut production in March, as US demand shrinks as the winter heating season comes to an end. Springtime and fall are known as "shoulder seasons" in the industry - oil demand shrinks as heating / cooling…

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 their SEO stuff by trying to rank for this term.

Here's how it works - optimize a page on your websites / blogs for the term Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World, and on May 1st (2008), the highest ranking website/blog for this term (as averaged across…

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 Tertzakian of ARC Financial Corp commented "There's a lot of uncertainty about the environmental legislation that's coming at us . . . rising costs are an issue. Put all those things together and there's no question that the excitement that was there in '06 seems to have…