Recently John Geha, the President of Coldwell Banker Canada visited the Coldwell Banker Peter Benninger Realty offices in Kitchener. During that visit John and Peter Benninger were interviewed by the Waterloo Region Record newspaper. In this article John discusses his view that there are hopeful signs that the economy is on the mend:

Consumer confidence fuels housing recovery

September 22, 2009 - BY ROSE SIMONE, RECORD STAFF - KITCHENER - When John Geha, president of Coldwell Banker Canada, was recently booking a trip from Toronto to Calgary, he was told every single flight was oversold. He has also learned that car rental companies are adding cars to their fleets and hotel managers are seeing business travellers coming back.

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To Geha, who runs the Canadian branch of a real estate network that has 267 offices in Canada and 3,600 worldwide, these are all strong signs that an economic recovery is well underway.

"It's not just in the number of houses being sold," Geha said Tuesday during a visit to the Coldwell Banker Peter Benninger Realty offices in Kitchener. "I know the consumer is out there," he said.

There are signs of life in the housing market as well, he said. Despite some "pockets of concern" in areas such as Windsor, which is closely tied to Detroit and the automobile manufacturing sector, resale home sales have been up in recent months in many regions across the country, he said.

Builders in the western regions, including parts of British Columbia, are now also seeing a surge in new home building, and "that will trickle its way across the country," he said.

Geha said he is not in a position to make pronouncements about whether all of this signals the end of the recession that started at this time last year, but he sees the return of consumer confidence as a big factor fuelling the housing market recovery.

Canada was always on more stable ground with its banking and housing sector compared to the United States, but the global recession did have a big impact on Canadian consumer confidence, which in turn affected the housing market last year, he said.

"There was a period of six to eight months where we had a dramatic slowdown, but we were never in the crisis that the United States was in. The foundation did not crumble underneath us."  Read the remainder of this article at The Record website.

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