Buy Low, Sell High
In a front page story yesterday, the local newspaper lamented that the average house here in Victoria costs $60,000 more than it did a year ago. Just imagine. It must have something to do with the Law of Supply and Demand or some other arcane economic principle.
That reminds me: earlier this year when the most recent BCAA tax assessments were landing in peoples’ mailboxes, a reader to that same paper posited that real estate fees were adding to the cost of a house purchase. The Times Colonist didn’t publish my response to that astute observation, so I take this opportunity to do so now:
“Well, yes, just as the pharmacist’s wages add to the cost of my pills and the sales clerk’s salary factors into the price of my socks when I buy them at The Bay. Luckily, however, there’s an answer to your reader’s problem: he can sell it himself. As consumers we have choices in an open and free society, and that is quite properly one of them. But short of gnawing on tree bark or learning to knit, does he have a solution for mine?”
Add comment August 3rd, 2007
