Archive for July, 2011

Strata Documents – the truth on how they are obtained by Real Estate Agents

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

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Strata Documents – the truth on how they are obtained by Real Estate Agents

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

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Telus Optik TV verses Shaw Cable

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Telus
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Stratas make 80 per cent of housing srarts

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

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BC waterfront prices down by 40% since peak of 2008

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Frank O’Brien
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Golf courses chalanging times as fewer players and competition lead to discounted rates

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

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Myth of Metro’s million-dollar house prices

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Western Perspective

Frank O’Brien
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West Side “benchmark” now $2 million

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

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The price for a typical detached house on the West Side of Vancouver soared to more than $2 million last month, an all-time high and up a startling 30.2 per cent from June of 2010, reports the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV.). The high benchmark price did not deter buyers, however, as more houses sold on the West Side last month, 214, than in any other Metro market. In East Vancouver, the typical house price is $839,867. “With sales below the 10-year average and home listings above what’s typical for the month, activity in June brought closer alignment between supply and demand,” Rosario Setticasi, REBGV president said. “With a sales-to-active-listings ratio of nearly 22 per cent, it looks like we’re in the upper end of a balanced market.” “The largest price increases continue to be in the detached home market on the Westside of Vancouver and in West Vancouver,” Setticasi said. “Since the end of May, the benchmark price of a detached home rose more than $147,000 on the Westside.” “Co-ops” explained We recently published an article on co-ops which may have confused some readers. Co-op expert and Realtor Emmanuel Lemal provides the following clarification: The proper designation of a co-op is “Apartment Corporation”. It includes an apartment building and the land on which it is built. It belongs to a private corporation. They came into existence prior to the implementation of the Condominium Act. When purchasing in a co-op, the buyer receives shares of that corporation along with a permanent lease on the unit. There is no time limit of ownership. An apartment corporation is a freehold property just like a freehold strata building with the difference that in a co-op, there is no separate land titles for each unit. The entire Apartment Corporation is registered on the Land Title as one single property. It should not be confused with government subsidized housing also called cooperatives. Government cooperatives are not handled by the Real Estate Board, and they are a completely different type of property. Apartment Corporations appeal to the more mature buyers for a variety of reasons: they are more affordable than strata-titled properties. The buyer must be approved by the Board of Directors and a minimum of 35 per cent down payment is usually required. In a co-op, there are often some restrictions on age (19+), rentals and pets. On the downside, only a handful of financial institutions (usually Credit Unions) are willing to finance co-ops. Copyright Real Estate Weekly

REBGV June Quarterly Report

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

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How the ‘Google Effect’ changes the brain

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

Lisa M. Krieger
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A new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how — and what — our brains choose to remember. When we know where to find information, we’re less likely to remember it — an amnesia dubbed “The Google Effect” by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University. Goodbye, soul-searching; hello, facts-at-fingertips. The finding, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, doesn’t prove that Google, Yahoo or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We’re still capable of remembering things that matter — and are not easily found online, Sparrow said. Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We’re outsourcing “search” from our brains to our computers. When we know where to find information, we’re less likely to remember it — an amnesia dubbed “The Google Effect” by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University. Goodbye, soul-searching; hello, facts-at-fingertips. The finding, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, doesn’t prove that Google, Yahoo or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We’re still capable of remembering things that matter — and are not easily found online, Sparrow said. Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We’re outsourcing “search” from our brains to our computers. “We’re not thoughtless empty-headed people who don’t have memories anymore,” Sparrow said. “But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go find things. And that’s kind of amazing.” In a series of four experiments at Columbia and Harvard, Sparrow and her team found that students are more likely to recall a trivial fact if they think it will be erased from the computer — and forget it if they’re assured it will be there. Similarly, the team proved that people are better at remembering where to find facts, rather than the facts themselves. The students, they found, recalled the names of files where information was stored, rather than the information itself. This creates a mental dependency on instant access to information, the team noted. No wonder the loss of our Internet connection feels like losing a friend, they wrote. Once we become reliant on a huge reservoir of information, it feels uneasy to be away from it, she said. “We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows,” the paper concludes. But in many ways, this is no different than humans’ age-old reliance on the “group memories” shared by friends, families and tribes, noted Sparrow and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. We may not recall our aunt’s birthday, the name of a high school teacher or who gave us that nice bottle of wine — but someone we know does. “We all have these people in our lives who know certain things. And we dip into what they know, when we need it,” said Sparrow. “We allow them to be responsible for it.” “I really think we are using the Internet the way we used to use people,” she said. While Google said it could not comment on the premise of the paper, spokesman Gabriel Stricker said, “Search is how Google began, and we’re constantly working to improve it. Search can always get better and faster at helping you find what you want, when you want it, where you want it.” Proving that the Internet is merely an expanded network of people, New York University professor Clay Shirky, author of the book “Cognitive Surplus,” has done the math: The articles, edits, and arguments on Wikipedia represent around 100 million hours of human labor, he calculated. That’s more than 11,400 years. If we quit remembering, “the Internet would grind to a halt,” Sparrow said. “Nobody would be feeding anything into it.” There are losses — unlike their great-grandparents, few of today’s children can recite poems like “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” Perhaps this is a skill that, when not practiced, turns rusty. Sparrow disagrees with Nicholas Carr, whose alarming 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” explains what he sees as the brain-corrosive side effects of digital devices. It doesn’t prove that we’re incapable of thinking long and hard about anything, she said. “And it could be that once we stop worrying about memorizing dates and facts and names, we’re better able to concentrate.” In fact, a wired life may actually open up more creative things to do with our brain, the team said. Psychologists have long known that it is easier to grasp an abstract concept when the brain is not fixated on memorizing facts. “Why remember something if I know I can look it up again? In some sense, with Google and other search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto machines,” Roddy Roediger, a psychologist at Washington University, told Science in an accompanying article. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.