May – Mixed signals in the market
May ended with 1049 sales, 1333 new listings, and 1450 properties on the market. That’s the lowest level of inventory for any May on record (second lowest was 1896 in May 2017) combined with the second highest sales rate.
The month started with activity continuing to cool from April, but that reversed in the latter half when sales picked up and new listings faltered. That stopped a multi-week increase in inventory levels, and while sales dropped down again to end the month, new listings dropped in concert.
It’s possible that this is a small surge in activity before the raising of the stress test which comes into effect today (and reduces purchasing power by about 5% for both insured and uninsured mortgages). Whatever the reason, it brought the sales to new list ratio back to the levels we haven’t seen since March.
Inventory ended the month essentially unchanged from April’s levels, but of course inventory should be increasing this time of year, with active inventory usually peaking in June. That means that seasonally adjusted inventory continued to decline in May. We are simply desperately short of inventory out there.
Bidding wars remained extremely common, even if they have subsided slightly in the single family market from March and April’s levels. You can see in the chart below that they are a symptom that arises when the market gets overheated. When we get below 2 months of inventory, bidding wars go through the roof. The good news is that we only need to get a bit above those 2 months of inventory for bidding wars to subside again as quickly as they came. For buyers, bidding wars make purchases risky and unpredictable as determining market value becomes extremely difficult. Apparently lenders are sending more mortgage approvals for manual review in markets like ours where price appreciation has been strong to validate the output of their automated models. However it’s worth remembering that if half of houses are going for over the asking price, then half are going at or under and not attracting multiple bids. There have been plenty of examples of puzzling listings posted in the comments here that seem priced to attract multiples but simply don’t, which can represent an opportunity.
The relationship between single family home market conditions and rate of bidding wars
Condo and townhouse sales remained similar to April levels, while single family sales dropped substantially, squeezed by high prices and limited inventory. It’s worth noting though that despite the drop from record levels, we are still well above pre-covid normal sales levels.
Months of inventory for the entire market remained at extremely low levels but continued to creep slightly higher from April, which was higher than March. As a reminder, normally we need about 6 months of inventory for prices to stop rising.
Therefore you would think that with such low inventory levels and ultra-hot market conditions, prices would continue to shoot higher every month. However that is not necessarily the case in all segments, as single family prices seem to have hit a bit of a wall in recent months with the median sales to assessed value ratio stable at 130%. Houses are still flying off the shelves but there’s a limit to what people can afford and it seems that rather than pushing prices higher right now, buyers are dropping out instead. Townhouse prices were also unchanged from April, stabilizing at a median sale of 25% over assessed value. Condo prices are still making up for lost ground, and increased again from April to May, now averaging 19% over assessment.
The luxury market which is likely a pretty good proxy for out of town buyers remains on fire and charting the rate of those sales continues to astonish. Back in 2017 I spoke to a reporter at the WSJ about the increase in Victoria’s luxury home sales. Turns out that was nothing compared to what was to come post-pandemic. Some of the increase in sales is from generally higher prices, but the high end market took off even before prices really moved upwards, and the increased activity coincides with an uptick in Vancouver buyers as well. We’ll get the Q2 figures on buyer origin sometime in July to confirm.
My take
It’s a mixed bag right now in the market. All parts of the market remain in extreme sellers market territory, and the bump in activity to end the month was surprising. On the other hand it’s clear that affordability constraints are biting and despite those super-hot market conditions there probably isn’t much headroom left on single family prices in the short term. The condo market continues to make up for lost ground, soaking up those buyers that have been squeezed from the detached and semi-detached side. However even there, seasonally adjusted sales have dropped back from the frantic levels to start the year.
The pandemic triggered this demand explosion, and with vaccinations rapidly ramping up to where restrictions will be completely lifted, it will be fascinating to see how far the pendulum of life swings back. A lot of people have made big life decisions based on the pandemic, but if I were to make a bet, I think the new normal will look quite close to the old normal. Most workers – even those in tech – will find themselves back to the office full or part time by the end of the summer. Hybrid arrangements could allow some people to maintain their life further from work, but in the end the commuting time and costs will still grind. That could cause a price pullback later in the outlying regions that were driven up more than the average.
For now though, the cooling is slight and orderly and we are far from any market conditions that would lead to imminent price declines.
It would be good to cite your sources. Credibility of source material is probably key here in coming to any conclusion.
totoro- Not what I read when I researched the subject. Depends on what study you access. Affordable housing assumes a person has some form of income. When illness strikes someone, they are unable to work and medical bills wipe them out, in the U.S. Lack of family support was also a major contributing factor. In Canada, I believe addiction and mental illness are the major reasons and like I stated, it would cost taxpayers billions to take proper care of the homeless if we could find enough people to staff the facilities required. That type of work is extremely mentally draining and few people would last very long before going on mental stress leave.
No, it is not. The primary causes in order of frequency are:
Among women and families with children domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-homelessness-such-a-problem-in-u-s-cities
The numbers of homeless with serious substance abuse/addictions is significant but homelessness tends to worsen or escalate addiction.
In the US among homeless these are the stats:
38% alcohol dependent
22% chemical dependent
33% have mental illness – 50-60% of homeless women are mentally ill
7% couldn’t find shelter (often due to being released from prison)
https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
Seems very similar to the numbers in Canada I’ve seen.
In the U.S. the primary cause of homelessness is financial ruin due to medical bills. We do not have that problem. I agree that most homeless people have a serious substance abuse addiction. I have stated that many of them have become dysfunctional due to this illness and are incapable of ever caring for themselves. The cost of rehabilitation and necessary support system is astronomical and would yield minimal success. I think the government’s solution is simple attrition, I read somewhere that life expectancy for the homeless is 39 years. Many of Canada’s homeless are born addicted, and brain damaged. They lack any chance of rehabilitation and would require billions to provide a care system for them, if you could find anyone to do the difficult work of managing their daily needs.
To me there is a difference between treatment and effective treatment. Scientific advances over the past 20 years have shown that drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease that results from the prolonged effects of drugs on the brain. I have little sympathy for the growing numbers of issues caused by homelessness and would be in favour of making homelessness illegal but only with mandatory direction to support services until stabilized.
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_url?url=http://ecnp-congress.eu/~/media/Files/ecnp/communication/talk-of-the-month/Wim%2520van%2520den%2520Brink/Addiction%2520is%2520a%2520brain%2520disease%2520and%2520it%2520matters.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rei-YKu4HIWEywT08YXgDA&scisig=AAGBfm0WZeyC8mtWJ79kzQthfGnqfUrjSQ&nossl=1&oi=scholar
Did you read the peer reviewed study “Drug problems among homeless individuals in Toronto, Canada: prevalence, drugs of choice, and relation to health status” I linked that found that less than half of the homeless population had drug problems? Not to say this is not a significant issue, it is.
There is treatment available for those that want it.
lol! You can’t link to a report from the poverty industry and claim that as credible.
Addiction is a medical condition. It says something about our society that we don’t have effective accessible treatment.
That is just not true.
https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-101/causes-homelessness
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-10-94
I can’t speak about all developed countries, but in Canada homelessness is almost entirely a result of drug addiction. It says something about our wealth that we can indulge people and have no expectation they will do anything to support themselves.
Are there or are there not more homeless people in developed countries? The answer is obvious. And every day it gets worse. I wish I lived in a fantasy.
This is patently false. In developed countries, cities are less polluted now than they have ever been.
In the past half century there has been an astounding improvement in the standard of living virtually everywhere in the world.
Further to the overpopulation discussion: A financial advisor on BNN stated: “ This is a good time to be old”. Life on our planet with 10 million plus people will be miserable for 70-80% of the less fortunate. It’s probably close to that now.
I’m just not seeing a 1% growth rate as dramatic. The CRD has a lot of potential for expansion and densification.
Building new cities is also possible, though governments aren’t currently interested in that.
New post and monday numbers https://househuntvictoria.ca/2021/06/07/are-the-rungs-in-the-property-ladder-growing-further-apart
The problem is bad government, look at the catastrophe at the south U.S. border.
The global population, currently at ~8 billion, is expected to top out at 11 billion in 80 years. That number of people is supportable and sustainable with current agriculture and technology. Malthus was wrong.
One have to wait and see, because urban dwellers are not having kids, while rural dwellers want to have more children so that they can work the fields that China is desperately in need of. For the last few years China has introduced subsidies and incentives to increase farming practice and to entice people to live in rural areas.
I agree with your parents that Canada have lots of space for a larger population, and I believe that we need a larger population to support our economy and to defend ourselves from external forces be it economic, political, or physical warfare. But, in order to have a growing and larger population we need to built a strong productive economy instead of a virtue signalling la la land.
I agree with the overpopulation and more stringent immigration regulations and some limits, but presently there are no political will to do so. To me the real reason is that Canadians are too consumed with gender and environmental virtue signalling to be concern with the lack of economy (industrial, commercial, natural resources extraction, manufacturing), hence there is a need to bolster up the housing market to keep the system afloat.
Canada Is Now 50% More Dependent On Housing Than The US At Peak Bubble — https://tinyurl.com/9ebe8fwb
Guess what, they won’t. China has allowed two children since 2016 and it has been a complete flop.
Mt. Tolmie – how can population growth not be a problem? You and the others who agree are completly naive. Its like when my dumb boomer parents said ” canada has lots of space! We could easily triple our population” yea beacuse all you need is space. Not like you need food, wood, steel, infrastructure etc.
I know this is not exactly what the dumb boomers on here are saying but it is similar. The earth cannot handle more people and our insaitable ways. The earth has been permantely damaged in every way by humans. More humans = more damage. That much is obvious to people with a quarter brain.
Mt Tolmie: Any way you cut it, immigration level’s of 400k a year means that we have to build a city a the size of Victoria each and every year. Or the equivalent in the existing urban areas. The vast majority of immigrants also want to reside in the same urban areas as everyone else.
One has to be almost disingenuous to ignore the fact that we are talking an extra hundred thousand housing units a year that have to be build. Everybody here keeps arguing that prices would be dropped if only we could ratchet up supply past the threshold of demand. Yes, the laws of supply and demand would kick un. But if we increase demand, which is what four hundred thousand new people actual represents in terms of new housing demand, faster than we can possible build supply than you are going to experience raising prices.
That is not to say that there are not benefits to immigration, obviously there are, but the question is what is the appropriate numbers for the next few years. If one wants to actually deal with the housing crisis the obvious step is to not increase demand for a few years until the housing stock is increased enough to drop prices.
I am old enough that this will not matter much to me but I find it tragically fascinating that people seem to be married either to their political dogma or in the case of the real estate industry to their self interest to the point of ignoring all logic or reason.
Mt. Tolmie- Locally, you are probably right, for now. Globally, the problem is overpopulation, look at the catastrophe at the south U.S. border. China has just allowed families to start having 3 children, and guess what, they will. Since I was born in 1955, the world’s population has almost tripled. Millions of people around the world want to move to Canada for our social benefits- free healthcare, pension, child support, etc… We simply cannot accommodate all the people in the world. Strict limits need to be imposed, but this will not get you elected as a large part of our population want to bring their entire family to the trough. Expect further pressure on living space to constantly increase with no end in sight.
I don’t see population increase as the problem. Rather, millennials are in the home-buying phase of their lives and have a greater preference for larger urban areas than previous generations
This is not an endless problem. There is a fixed number of millennials and if we were to build sufficient housing, the problem would be solved.
Last time I looked we do have a bit above replacement birth rate. Additionally a lot of jobs have been reduced by automation and a real shift coming in the next ten years. But fine for the sake of argument we might need a small amount of immigration to keep the population steady, what we dont need are the numbers we are presently getting. Our housing crisis is primarily driven by population increases.
Endless growth is not sustainable in the long run and certainly has negative impacts in the short run.
I lived in the GTA for 15 years. Areas there considered very high-end are common place in thinly populated places like the Gulf Islands. A house in Port Credit on the southern end of Mississauga with a handful of trees is considered a luxury. Trees in that number on Saltspring or even Metchosin or Collwood is, at least currently, considered typical and normal. Joni Mitchell had it right: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone.
• I loved my trip to the UK and Europe. The only way the vacation could have been improved is if the crowds had been bigger.
Actually the reason people go to Europe and not, say Greenland is because of what the population density has enabled there.
People go to Europe for the history, architecture, and in some areas the natural beauty — non of which relies on 100 million let a alone 900 million. Greenland is actually quite a popular destination but the cold does deter a lot of visitors.
The concept of retirement at 55 or 65 when people live to 90 is probably not sustainable unless we get to some sort of place where the benefits of automation and AI are distributed amongst the population.
Actually the reason people go to Europe and not, say Greenland is because of what the population density has enabled there.
The housing crisis has taken its worst turn ever over the past year, in which Canada has seen the lowest population growth in decades. So I don’t think it’s just about population. And even if the population of Canada remained static you’d see growth issues in “desirable” areas (hint, hint).
As mentioned below, a static population would create a number of problems which will be difficult to address. The housing crisis isn’t really difficult to address, in principle, there are just too many people who don’t want prices to go down.
I know. I so hope one day society can build an economy that doesn’t rely on interminable population growth. Because, outside of the economy, population growth isn’t all that fantastic.
Cases in point…things nobody says:
• We’re moving back to southern Ontario. The region is way better than when we left; it has 4 million more people!
• I loved my trip to the UK and Europe. The only way the vacation could have been improved is if the crowds had been bigger.
• It’s easier and less stressful to book a campsite at Rathtrevor every single year!
Cool, we can start reducing federal, provincial, and municipal staff along with wage cuts. Not to mention service reductions (healthcare, infrastructure, well anything government does) at all levels of government and the elimination of the random cheques people get from government as well. Then those defined benefit pensions can disappear too when they don’t have enough new contributors or economic growth from a declining tax base to support it. We can also have businesses shut down for lack staff. But since we will be employing less we won’t need those coming here to work in old folks homes, daycares and agricultural services either. Since we train such a surplus of doctors, engineers and other high skilled folks here, we shouldn’t have any problems… Lol..
True. But I think the economy will be in trouble with a below replacement rate birth rate and an aging population. We would definitely need to drastically cut back retirement benefits.
If we chose to keep Canada’s population roughly static we wouldn’t have to increase sprawl or density. It would solve the housing crisis without annoying any group except overeager urban planners.
Marko, can you please give an example or two of a “chopped” home that turns buyers off?
Not anymore… The junkie apocalypse the last several years in addition to the lack of family suitable housing options has put that to an end for us. We were making a go of it with close access parks and a larger condo. However, it is just unsafe for families downtown now or the amount of work and planning to keep it safe is not worth my energy.
Do we know many families live downtown? Or want to? I think it is not a great spot for family condos – seems better at University Heights with the onsite daycare.
Energy at what cost is acceptable?
China Helped Make Solar Power Cheap Through Subsidies, Coal And Allegedly, Forced Labor —
https://tinyurl.com/4h8mnjh9
https://www.timescolonist.com/real-estate/residents-concerned-about-scope-of-harris-green-project-1.24327205
Looking at adding 1500 rentals, let’s see what council does. I am tired of the construction and I will lose a part of my view, but I am trying to move out of downtown any way (once the opportunity presents itself). The density is actually needed, I equate people complaining about density downtown to when my neighbors complain about the noise from restaurant patios…..why, you decided to live downtown, but you don’t like noise? You like the convenience of everything in walking distance, but you want everything closed at 6pm? You think accommodation/housing should cost less, but think additional volume shouldn’t be added?
I am amazed at the foolish line that the new will be expensive. So what if it is? Just let business take the risk, and guess what: if they build too much or the business plan fails, it becomes cheap housing. The new construction should make the older and crappier stock less expensive (that’s what the neighbours really don’t like and not that new is for wealthy or lacks social housing) it’s that the people that currently own in existing old don’t want it devalued next to new. The big risk is losing families out of downtown, so maybe just require larger percentages of 3 bedrooms in all new downtown developments. Unless council and people are lying about caring about the environment and just want to see those people with families moving out of downtown and parents having to commute by car because of a lack of 3 bedrooms downtown.
It should be interesting over the next couple of years as the government allows entrance to another 800 thousand immigrants. Has anyone in Ottawa thought about the housing implications for the people already struggling to deal with the housing issues?
Based on what I am seeing on the ground I honestly believe lack of inventory is restricting sales numbers. I will suggest to clients they go 50k over ask…they will come back with “let’s do 100k over ask, don’t worry we won’t blame you if we overpay” and they will still lose out in a bidding war. We are talking unconditional offers too. I have been pretty much showing all the new listings in the core 900-1200k in the last month and lucky if TWO tidy/clean/non-chopped/non-busy road homes come up per week and then you have hundreds of buyers.
I think the end game here eventually is a lot of buyers just end up being priced out and give up reducing demand.
I was also wondering if the market was starting to cool a bit. The next month should be interesting, Less demand or just not a lot of inventory and some of the new inventory has very optimistic pricing.
Petition aims to stop the sale of city-owned land in Langford
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/petition-aims-to-stop-the-sale-of-city-owned-land-in-langford-1.5457951
If you overlay the graph of house sales with contemporary Bitcoin and Tesla stock prices it might be revelatory.
All the fiendishly clever Victorianites “working” from home and dabbling in modish investments have a new mantra:
“you’re not as rich as you think you are”
Worth watching closely in the next couple weeks.
Quite the change since end of month. Always a bit hard to tell when new lists and sales are tracking this closely whether a drop in sales is reflecting earlier drop in listings, or is actually a drop in demand.
“I am selling my house as we speak. I have had 3 showings, of 15 in two days, that were a realtor only, that I know of, and some have needed access to my wifi to stream a tour of my house to cities like Edmonton. Though I have no stats it appears to me that there is out of town interest in Victoria. Maybe out of town, not overseas , buyers are having an effect on prices.”
Are you selling your house privately or using a realtor? There doesn’t seem to be much incentive to use a realtor right now from what I’ve heard from many sellers in this market. Homes are selling themselves in this market and realtors are making great money for kinda just standing there is what I’ve been told. Put in a bit of work of your own and use a lawyer is what I’ve been advised as I’m considering selling off a SFH. Thoughts?
Nearly back to pre-pandemic levels of employment
Victoria unemployment rate unchanged at 6.2% but employment up by 3200 jobs from April so we’re going in the right direction.
Nice. Will try to make it to the public hearing and push for 12 storeys, at least in the middle building. Perfect location for rentals, on transit, with amenities, close to university.
Well you can’t blame the politicians for holding up this one anyway.
University Heights redevelopment on the table again
https://www.timescolonist.com/real-estate/university-heights-redevelopment-on-the-table-again-1.24326594
Trump was really a gift to Canada, we had lots of smart Canadians and immigrants wanting to stay, or come to study and work here.
Under Biden that could reverse again. Growing up in the 90s the term brain drain was always in the news. I bet we’ll be hearing it a lot again. Why stay when high skilled work pays less and housing costs a lot more?
Wow, described as 5 towers, 32 floors, providing 1,500 residential rental units. Leo you should contact the developer (interviewed at 0:50 in the video) to see how family friendly these would be. For comparison, the ongoing spec tax flop only identified about 750 units in Greater Victoria, and this development would provide double that (1500). It would add 1% to the total dwellings, 3% to the rental dwellings, and a huge boost to rental vacancies available.
They should give those developers the keys to the city.
It would be very interesting to know how many private sales of homes have occurred in the last 6 months. 5%,10%? I’m sure this is contributing to the low inventory. It’s easy to list your property online, most real estate agents do, pick your own price and deal with buyers as you see fit. Not for everyone, but individuals who are business oriented would be able to handle what is actually a simple process.
Island’s tallest building pitched in Victoria
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2215706
I am selling my house as we speak. I have had 3 showings, of 15 in two days, that were a realtor only, that I know of, and some have needed access to my wifi to stream a tour of my house to cities like Edmonton. Though I have no stats it appears to me that there is out of town interest in Victoria. Maybe out of town, not overseas , buyers are having an effect on prices.
It should be corrected to read lots of money chasing houses. Doesn’t matter if it is 10 people buying 10 houses or 2 people buying 10 houses.
So often over the years the question “Who can afford these prices?” has been posed.
Each time, it turns out, the answer is: a lot of people.
That’s what buyers thought in 1981. And back then wages kept up with inflation.
Buyers only have to hold on until the hyper inflation kicks in. Then they are laughing.
But that belief usually becomes widespread when prices have already been increasing rapidly and thus affordability has gone down. There have been exceptions to that when prices break out of a slump, for example in the late 1980’s in Vancouver.
That Better Dwelling article also neglects to mention that the info (which is pulled from the National Bank of Canada) does not factor in the down payment in the calculation for sufficient income. They either didn’t bother to read the methodology of the report they’re referencing, or are deliberately spinning the information.
Patriotz
But we seem to have very strong sales at this time. For the last five years I keep reading that prices are unaffordable yet year after year sales seem to remain strong. So the question is who are all these peole affording houses at a time when prices are unaffordable. it does not seem to be dreaded foreign money and in spite of what downtown looks like there cant be that many drug dealers. so who is finding it affordable?
Or if there is wide belief that prices will increase rapidly
IMHO primarily down payment assistance to first time buyers, which percolates up to non-first time buyers.
It’s usually the case that sales are lower when affordability is higher and vice versa.
On the one hand it is unaffordable and on the other we have a record number of sales. So how are the people who can afford to buy?
The Better Dwelling article is basing this all on a “composite home across Canada” requiring at least an annual household income of $130,921.
What the heck is a composite home? An average SFH home in Winnipeg is 374k and under 300k in Saskatoon. Where are they getting this composite home from? I’d say any composite is meaningless given the wide ranges in prices across Canada, as is the article.
how much value do renos add to old condos? This is probably the most extreme example i have ever seen:
https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/23283280/408-1149-rockland-ave-victoria-fairfield-west
This has got to close to 300k premium they are asking for over one that isn’t renoed.
That said the new listings data from 2000 to 2010 in the last runup did show an increase over those years of booming prices. So maybe it’s just a super slow reaction to increasing prices.
It’s a pandemic driven anomaly in the market right now and people are harming themselves financially. Anyone who is defining this as a new normal or sustainable market is deluding themselves.
Here’s some funny numbers on who now can afford.
From: https://betterdwelling.com/the-canadian-property-bubble-reached-the-point-where-few-people-can-actually-buy/
Anyways, the cost of borrowing has started to climb. I renewed my pre-approval the other day and it’s .5% higher than my previous approval from January. Anecdotally, I have been hearing from quite a few acquaintances that they are wanting to sell to get the peak prices they are seeing now, but for them they want to do it next year ( I just don’t have the heart to tell them that like yesterday’s market isn’t today’s market neither is tomorrow’s market). I guess the one good thing out of all of this is that it has proven to the xenophobes out there that were previously blaming foreign buyers for the escalations (somehow thinking 2%-5% of the market was driving high cost) that it was actually just our domestic hosers borrowing way too much money on top of cash they are getting from family.
Mostly dropoff in demand coming through the rest of the year I think. I don’t see any particular reason that we would see a big uptick in new listings. Return to normal, return to normal demand levels? That’s my bet anyway.
Frank – if that takes off I worry about low income hobbits being displaced by underground gentrification.
Here’s a solution to the lack of housing.
The last two weeks were really bad as a buyer. I can’t help but wonder if it was folks being extra aggressive to get in before the stress test hike? Time will tell but I understand you’re frustrations. I’ve also experienced some unprofessional realtor behaviour in the last month and have considered taking a break. I’m not saying all realtors are bad. Mine is great. I feel like this market is bringing out the worst in some people.
Can confirm from the front line of house hunting, it’s baaaaad out there. About ready to throw in the towel for the summer and spend my time camping and at the beach for much needed head in sand therapy.
What will cause inventory to rise if not these incredible prices? With vaccine rates picking up and covid rates plummeting are there sellers that were holding off listing, who will do so now? Or will any relief just come in the form of less demand?
If this was a stock, that 130% rel/assmt chart looks a lot like a resistance level… a time to be trimming vs adding.
Question is where the new support level is.
“Apartment-condominium prices in Calgary remain 16 per cent below where they were in 2014.”
https://calgaryherald.com/business/local-business/home-sales-in-may-decline-from-previous-month-but-calgary-still-a-sellers-market
That’s broken down by type (note small correction in chart). The 1049 sales is the total for all types including commercial
That chart makes it look like this month was just below 500 sales, but I assume that’s the median? We need that dot off the charts above it (at 1000)!
And a different way to look at sales in historical context.