Boom-and-bust may not be the norm in Calgary anymore. So, what is the new “normal”?

Todd Hirsch, Chief Economist at ATB, gets asked a lot “are we getting back to normal?” When people ask him this, his reply is blunt: “I say, ‘If you mean early 2014, no, we’re not going back to that.’”

According to a recent Globe and Mail article, “Calgary’s housing market is an outlier compared with Toronto and Vancouver, the two cities Canadians tend to talk about when they discuss real estate. Rather than a steady climb upward, housing prices in Calgary have historically shot skyward only to correct soon after – and only then to boom and bust again in a repeating cycle.”

While the article talks of Calgary’s economy “bouncing back”, I’m not sure the “bouncing” is the right word. We are, however, seeing steady GDP growth but real estate sales have dropped and prices have softened.

Despite seeing increased supply, many owners aren’t panicking. Are they waiting for the next boom? I’m not sure, but the fact that we’re not seeing huge spikes in inventory, is a good thing for price stability.

“In some respects, if we’re lucky, we are getting off the boom-and-bust cycle. We’re looking at more moderate rates of growth – probably more in line with a typical Canadian province and a typical mature economy in the Western world,” says Hirsch. “Around 2.5-per-cent [growth] is what we should be expecting as potential, not 4.5 or 5.5 per cent, which is what we were growing at for the first five years of this decade.”

Perhaps, as Ann-Marie Lurie of CREB says, “a shift in thinking is all that’s needed for a new, more balanced normal in Calgary.”

I, for one, am in favour of a more stable market. Making it easier for people to plan.