[MacDougalbry]

A couple of months ago we were checking out a used car on a car lot. The salesman was giving me the sales pitch on their in-house financing; I gave him the blow-off by telling him that I would finance it off our line of credit (a lie). He came back with a line for this right away: "Most people want to save their line of credit for an investment property." (And this was no fancy BMW dealership or something like that.)

It seems that everyone is doing this or trying to do this? Eavesdropping on conversations at Starbucks, it sounds like an epidemic, from housewives chatting over plans to invest in a townhome to young MBA types planning the purchase of a whole apartment building.

This is what you call a feedback loop: property values go up, people use this equity to invest in more property, driving property values higher, creating more money to invest again. It is no longer a mystery to me why prices have run up so quickly.

And Red is right, the latest trend is selling-out. My wife has a coworker headed back to Saskatoon, a neighbour is thinking of going to Vernon. Another has left the country. It is starting to sound appealing.