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By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | August 2026 (Chilliwack Fair Edition) Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes Last week I wrote about birth rates, death rates, and the demographic future of Canadian housing. My wife suggested that this week I write about something that does not make people want to check their will. She has a point. So this one is different. The Chilliwack Fair runs Friday through Sunday this week and somewhere in that parking lot is a real estate lesson I did not

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | July 2026 Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes This last weekend my kids came over for dinner. Both adults, both doing their thing, both reasonably tolerant of their father's habit of turning every conversation into an accidental real estate blog. What started as a dinner conversation led me straight to the Statistics Canada data on Canada's population decline and what it means for Chilliwack real estate in 2026. My wife has been talking with fr

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | July 2026 Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes I have been writing this blog for several months now. I have covered federal housing policy, pipeline economics, rental markets, blend and extend mortgages, and the great basement renovation of 2026. I once dressed as Michael Jackson to make a point about rent prices. My credibility is clearly limitless. But every once in a while it helps to put down the analogies and just look at the actual numbers

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | July 2026 Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes The basement suite renovation is complete. What started as an idea I wrote about back in April has turned into a finished suite, a signed lease, and a lot to tell you about how the reality compared to the plan. The math made sense on paper. The blend and extend mortgage strategy gave me the financing vehicle. And the empty nester logic gave me the motivation. Then I actually had to build the thing.

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | June 2026 Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes I put down my hammer for two and a half weeks to finish my basement renovation. I will tell you how that went in the next post. Spoiler: the finish line looked closer than it was. It always does. But while I had my head down, the federal and provincial governments apparently got busy. The BC housing announcement affecting Chilliwack development charges in 2026 is the most significant local housing s

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | May 2026 Est. reading time: 5-6 minutes I get asked some version of this question roughly four times a week right now. On the football field. In the grocery store. In my DMs. From people who read last week's blog and want the one sentence answer I deliberately did not give them. "Is the bottom in?" I have been writing this blog for several months now. I have covered federal election housing policy, a $4 billion pipeline running through our

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | May 2026 Est. reading time: 5-6 minutes Every spring the same conversation starts up. Multiple offers. Quick sales. The market is heating up. Someone's cousin got ten offers on a bungalow in three days and now everyone assumes that is the whole story. It is not the whole story. For every home that sells in a day right now there is another one two streets over that has been sitting for eight weeks with a price reduction and a seller who is

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | May 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes A few weeks ago I wrote two blogs in a row making a fairly enthusiastic case for turning your unused basement into a rental suite. I talked about blend and extend mortgages, construction costs, revenue potential, and the general brilliance of the strategy. My wife suggested I might be getting carried away. I told her I was simply being thorough. Then rentals.ca published its latest rental report and

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | May 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes There is a very large group of people in Chilliwack right now who have been doing the same thing for about two years. They found a home they liked. They ran the numbers. The numbers did not quite work. And then they made a completely rational decision: wait for rates to come down, and revisit it when things look better. I am not here to tell you that was the wrong call. In a lot of cases it was entir

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | April 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Last week I wrote about turning an unused basement into a revenue suite. I did not plan a follow-up this soon, but the timing of a federal announcement made it unavoidable. This past week the federal government approved Enbridge's $4 billion Sunrise Expansion Program, a natural gas pipeline expansion of the Westcoast pipeline system in BC. If you follow energy news you already heard about it. If yo

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | April 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Both kids moved out recently. I am not going to sugarcoat the emotional side of that. It is a lot. The house feels different. The fridge stays full longer than it used to. The dog has nobody to beg scraps from except two adults who really should know better by now, and yet somehow do not. What I am left with is a three storey, 3,400 square foot house. Two adults. One cat. One dog. And a 1,200 squar

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | April 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Every election cycle, housing gets big promises on the campaign trail. Then Parliament gets involved, other parties pump the brakes, and what started as bold policy turns into something smaller, slower, and watered down by the time it gets through the door. That pattern just changed. Yesterday, the Liberals won three bye-elections and crossed from minority into majority territory. If you do not fol

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | April 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Every year, around the time the Fraser Valley starts to thaw out and the cherry blossoms show up, the same piece of advice starts circulating. From parents, from coworkers, from mortgage brokers, from real estate agents. You have heard it so many times it probably feels like established fact at this point. "Spring is the best time to buy or sell real estate." And here is the thing: it is not entire

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | April 1st 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Disclaimer: This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or mortgage advice. Please consult a licensed mortgage professional for guidance specific to your situation. I have had some version of this conversation at least a dozen times in the last few months. And every time, the move up buyer in Chilliwack in 2026 sitting across from me is surprised when

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | March 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes Disclaimer: This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. For guidance specific to your mortgage situation, please speak with a licensed mortgage professional. Every time the Bank of Canada makes a rate announcement, something predictable happens. Phones buzz with news alerts. Social media lights up. People with fixed rate mortgages either breathe a sigh of re

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | March 2026 Est. reading time: 7-8 minutes If you've spent any time on social media, YouTube finance channels, Reddit housing threads or chatting in the driveway ith crazy uncle Dave in the last few years, you've seen or heard some version of this headline: "Canada's mortgage default wave is coming." It gets shared, it gets clicks, it gets people worried. And then... it doesn't happen. And then the same prediction gets recycled the followin

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | March 11th 2026 Est. reading time: 7 minutes If you've opened a news app in the last week, you've been hit from multiple directions. Tariffs. A war in Iran. Oil surging past $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. Stock markets selling off. The kind of headlines that make people freeze whether they're buying groceries, running a business, or trying to figure out whether now is the right time to buy or sell a home. So let me do somethi

Buying a Home in Chilliwack By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | March 4th 2026 Est. reading time: 7 minutes Let me show you a number that stopped me in my tracks when I pulled the December stats. Active listings in Chilliwack finished 2025 at their highest level for that month in over a decade; sitting 41.3% above the 10-year average . We had 922 homes on the market heading into the new year. By January, only 115 of them sold. Read that again. Nearly a thousand homes availa

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | Fraser Valley Real Estate Reading time: ~7 minutes There's a conversation I have more and more often these days. A homeowner (usually in their late 60s or early 70s) sits across from me and says something like: "Matt, I'm house rich and cash poor. I don't want to sell, but I need money." It's one of the most common financial tensions facing Canadian retirees right now. Years of rising home values across the Fraser Valley have left a lot o

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt Something is shifting in how Fraser Valley families think about home ownership, and if you pay close attention to what's happening in Chilliwack right now, you can see it playing out in real time. More families are buying together. Not beside each other, not in the same neighbourhood together. On the same property. Under the same roof, or at least on the same lot. Grandparents moving in with their adult children. Adult children who can't aff