The Myplace Playbook // 073
Hey Everyone,
Here's something I didn't know until recently. The dog days of summer aren't a figure of speech. They're a date range.
July 3 to August 11. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Which means we're one week in, and there are 33 days left.
Thirty-three. It sounds like a lot when you say it in March. It sounds like nothing when you say it in July.
You can feel it tightening already.
Campfires are still allowed out here, for now. So the hot dogs are safe and the ring in the backyard is legal and I intend to make full use of both.
But look at what's happening around it. The big burn piles, Category 3, have been off the table since May 21. Category 2 goes tomorrow at 1pm and doesn't come back until Halloween. And one fire centre over in Kamloops, campfires themselves are done as of tomorrow. Gone. No warning to speak of.
So we've got our little fire and our folding chairs, and everything around them is closing, one category at a time.
That's summer in a nutshell. You get it, and then you get less of it, and then you get a photo of it on your phone in November.
Now here's what I actually want to say.
I've been doing this a long time, and there's one thing I hear more than anything else in July.
"We probably should have bought in the spring."
I hear it every year. I heard it four times last week.
And every time, I want to say the same thing, so I'm going to say it here where everybody can read it.
You can't buy in the spring. Not anymore. Not this spring. It's over. It's not available. Nobody in the history of this business has ever bought a house in a season that already happened.
Sitting in July, looking backward at April, is the single most useless thing you can do with a summer.
Because the fall is still completely in front of you.
And the fall market, it's not made in the fall.
The people who buy in September and October, the ones who see a listing on a Tuesday and have an accepted offer by Thursday, they didn't start in September. They started right about now. In the dog days. In the heat, when nobody feels like doing paperwork.
They got pre-approved. They got a rate hold. They found out what they could actually afford instead of guessing. And then they spent August at the lake with the whole thing already handled, waiting for the good listings to show up.
The fall buyers get made in July. Every single year.
And this is why 33 days matters.
A rate hold runs 120 days.
Do that math with me. Take one this week, and you're covered into early November.
The dog days end August 11. Your rate hold doesn't. It sails right through the end of summer, past Labour Day, through the entire fall market, and out the other side.
That's the part I love about this. Summer is short. What you set up during it isn't.
One more reason not to wait.
The Bank of Canada announces again next Wednesday, July 15. And this one comes with a full Monetary Policy Report, which is the document where they lay out their actual forecasts.
That matters more than most people think. As I wrote back in June, fixed rates follow the bond market, not the Bank's announcement. And the bond market reads those forecasts closely. The overnight rate can sit perfectly still at 2.25% while fixed rates move on what the Bank says about next year.
A hold taken before Wednesday protects you from whatever the bond market decides to do with that report. Rates drop after? You take the lower one. Rates firm up? You're already locked.
It costs nothing. It takes about a day. And I say this every few months because people keep not doing it.
So here's my ask.
Hit reply and tell me one thing: when do you want to be in a place?
Not "someday." A season. Fall. Next spring. A year from now. Whatever's true.
Tell me the season, and I'll tell you what needs to happen this month for that to work out. If the answer is "nothing yet, you're early," I'll say that too. I'm not going to invent urgency that doesn't exist.
But if the answer is "actually, you should have started three weeks ago," you deserve to hear that while there are still 33 days on the clock.
Go have a fire while you still can. Then write me back.
-Andrew
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