Paint by Number

Paint by Number

Numbers in a column are boring! The accumulation of numbers for 10 years is really boring. What’s fun is applying them to a canvas to see if they tell a story.

What Picture Do You See?

Splattered on this picture is a bunch of numbers reflecting activity in Vancouver’s real estate market. The numbers are recorded as red, blue and green brush strokes of the average sale price, number of listings and the number of sold detached properties. Your market perspective will determine what you see.

Notice the sudden rise in the green ‘units sold’. In July-09 it exceeded previous historical levels. While that happened, the blue listings seem to hint a faltering, appearing as a slight downward brush stroke. As the paint is still wet, what remains to be seen is whether August’s green returns to previous levels.

Prominent in it’s boldness, the red average price continues its rise. A defiant color, it has withstood the trials of global economic strife and circumstance. Such brashness seems inexplicable. A guess might find origin in its brilliance the reflection of cheap mortgage money or, light cast by the golden hue of early inheritance from doting family members.

Deviating to the sensational, your teeth grind in thought as you seek understanding. Will the forward march of rising prices continue to where one day, it will flood the canvas red or, will it turn to blacken the canvas with ash from fortunes lost?

Paintings are strange things. From person to person interpretation of meaning differs. While this picture captures the historical changes in Vancouver real estate, the future is wet paint that precludes absolutes. The allure of the future is in the prediction. Within resides a 50-50 chance that your view is the right one. Ratified only by time, the gamble, the prediction, is affirmed when the paint is dry.

Rainbows

Within paint by number there are certainties. Follow the numbers and dab red here, blue there and green somewhere else. An alternate name for the process is paint by history. Something you don’t find in paint by number sets is a rainbow. Rainbows are fleeting. They are not a formula – a pattern of numbers brought together on a canvas. Rainbows are here one moment and there the next – their appearance is variable and occurrence, speculation. It’s power fractures light into a thousand colors that dazzle, confuse and amaze. As fractured light, the perspective of a number painting is like a rainbow. Each point of view is vibrant and susceptible to variable prediction. It may be why the pot of gold is never found.

*Disclaimer: Statistics Courtesy REBGV. While believed to be accurate they are not guaranteed.

**Numbers provided may vary as they are dynamically posted by the REBGV.