I’ve been following this Urban Toronto forum thread for some time now. There’s a bunch of people speculating that the 1 Bloor project is in some financing trouble and about to be cancelled. I’m not sure what the deal is, but anonymous posting on Internet forums doesn’t give a lot of credibility to the information. Then again, Bazis the developer is from Kazakhstan (of Borat fame).

A 3-minute slideshow with voiceover that explains the financial crisis in 3 minutes. It’s done by the Washington Post. A pretty good explanation if you haven’t been keeping up to date lately.

PS: If you haven’t been keeping up with the news, don’t check your investment account balances.

Toronto Real Estate Board reported sales from the first two weeks of October. In Toronto, prices were down 15%, in the 905 it was a lower 8% and overall it averaged out to an 11% drop. Full press release is after the break:

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You may not remember this, but two years ago the Ontario government put a freeze on all property tax assessments for two years. This was because the assessment organization, MPAC, was forced to review all their policies and procedures after an investigation found that the assessment system was “secretive, inaccurate and unfair.”

Now that the review is over, MPAC is back in the business of assessing your property. What’s happened to your property over the past two years? My bet is that it went up - and significantly. Ontario average property values are up 20% during that period and hot markets like Toronto are up even more.

Unless your municipality has lowered the rate of property tax (which is HIGHLY unlikely) you’ll be getting a nice fat bill in the mail in about a week that will be demanding 20% more taxes than you paid last year.

It took the government FOUR years to announce then implement this. Amazing how long it takes from announcement to action when it comes to our federal government. The National Do Not Call website is launching today, add  your number there and telemarketers will stop calling you.

Did you click on the link? Having problems? Yes, that means the website is not working. As reported on Canada.com, the site is experiencing difficulty because of traffic. I find this amazing since this service is outsourced to none other than Bell Canada.

Do not expect to be completely free of calls, check out the large amount of exceptions that the federal government approved during the past four years:

• charities
• political parties
• polling companies
• businesses with products or services they’ve inquired about in the past six months
• businesses that they’ve had relationships with in the past 18 months.

Weaksauce.

The media surrounding the real estate market has been in denial for several months, if not over a year. Despite a lot of negative statistics, building associations, the real estate board and agents on TV have repeatedly been saying that the market is fine, and healthy and still worth it for people to be buying and selling homes.

However, if you cut through the rose-colored glasses, you’ll see that sales in Toronto, the GTA,  and ALL the cities surrounding us are down for the year by  20-67%. the Building Industry and Land Development Association released these numbers Friday:

Google squeaked into 10th place in Interbrands “Top 100 Brands” list. Coke is still at the very top. I think that an Internet business like Google has a much easier time reaching a global audience than some large product/distribution organization like Coke.

Update: I just heard on the news (BNN) that Blackberry got into the list for the first time, at #73.

If you have a Starbucks payment card (gift card) and you register it online, you will get 2 hours of free WiFi use every day. If you’re a user of Bell Sympatico for Internet access, you unlimited access at Starbucks.

This is a great promotion that has been available in the States for some time, but just reached Canada recently. On top of the WiFi access, you get free syrup and milk options on your drinks and unlimited brewed coffee refills.

Somehow, an old news article about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy in 2002 got circulated as “new” news on Monday. This had an immediate and dramatic effect on their stock, it fell from $10.60 to around $4 before the stock was halted and new news issued to clarify the incorrect passing of the old news article around the various news services.

A full summary of the event is at HotHardware.

I’ve used Feedburner to provide email subscriptions to my blog. It seems some of my friends (you know who you are) are too lazy to check the site for new content. If you are interested, you can get an email subscription.