Did you know that Arnold Schwarzenegger was my hero when I was younger?
True story.
I was one of the very fortunate few who got to experience this thing called a “laser-disc player” in 1992.
What in the world is a laser-disc?
Well, if you consider that when it comes to music and audio technology, we first had cassettes, and then benefited from the improved technology that compact discs offered, it was the exact same thing for video! We went from Beta-Max and VHS cassettes to the logical next step: discs. In this case, laser-discs.
But you’ve never heard of laser-discs, right?
You only know DVD’s.
Well, believe it or not, in between VHS cassettes and DVD’s, there was a short-lived experimentation called the “laser-disc.”
And when my father bought a big-screen TV in 1992 – the type that was about 3-feet thick and wood-panelled on the sides, the forward-thinking techie who sold him the unit, with THX surround sound system, told him he needed a laser-disc player.
“It’s the way of the future,” my old man was told.
My father was also told that the only movie in the world that would really, truly, fully, and confidently display the power of THX in-home surround sound was noneother than Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
I came home one day in September of 1992, and I swear, I could hear it from the street outside!
The floors were literally shaking as the sound of the original Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was revving his Harley Davidson and blasting a shotgun at the T-1000 Terminator, played by Robert Patrick, as the latter character gave chase on an 18-wheeler.
Oh, Arnold!
The greatest action-movie actor of all time, and please don’t tell me it’s Tom Cruise.
In any event, laser-discs were a spectacular failure since not only were they as large as an LP but you actually had to flip the disc halfway through the movie! Imagine that? You’re rolling along, in the midst of the action of a great movie and then the screen goes to blue and it says “flip disc.”
I have watched Terminator about five hundred times, no word of a lie. Yeah, we had Die Hard and Indiana Jones on laser-disc as well, but Terminator was the go-to because of the sound.
To this day, can’t see the word “Terminated” without hearing Arnold’s voice.
When I got into bodybuilding in my early-20’s, I discovered Arnold’s “Pumping Iron,” which I only got a copy of by purchasing a dubbed VHS version off eBay in 2001. Arnold was a god. Is a God. But enough about that.
Last week, all this talk of “terminated listings” on MLS totally stuck in my head.
On Friday night, once my wife was asleep, I watched Terminator on Netflix.
On Saturday night………..once my wife was asleep (what did you expect?), I watched Terminator 2.
And on Sunday, I sat down to collect statistics on the 2022 market thus far and examine listing terminations.
As I mentioned in last Wednesday’s blog post, this article appeared in the Toronto Star:
“Toronto Property Listings Are Being Cancelled At ‘Unprecedented’ Rates”
It got me wondering about the rate at which terminated listings is increasing, since, presumably, it is increasing.
The article noted that terminations are “up 643% since January,” but that doesn’t tell us much, since there are fewer new listings in January than in June.
So in order to understand the market, we want to look at the ratio of terminations to new listings, and we want to look how this percentage compares from January through June, both in the GTA and in individual TRREB regions.
It’s important to note that while “new listings” is a statistic published in the monthly TRREB Market Watch, “terminations” is not. So I had to use MLS, search unavailable listings by “terminated date,” and then filter by each month. That’s just in case some of you are wondering where the hell I got this data from.
It’s also important to note that when comparing “new listings” and “terminated listings,” the terminated listings are not necessarily one of the new listings. You can terminate a listing in August that was put on MLS in July. What we’re working with here is simply a ratio to be used as an indicator.
So with the pretext out of the way, let’s look at the whole GTA first and foremost:
With only 7,979 new listings in the GTA in January, it’s tough to draw comparisons to other months.
Only 636 listings were terminated, but of course, this could include listings from November or December.
To see only 8% is quite shocking, but then again, who would list in January and terminate in the same month? List on January 6th and you’re terminating before the 31st? Not unless you have a failed offer night, but in January that wasn’t happening!
The same can be said for February, which was a busy month, and which only saw a 10% termination rate.
By March, that percentage had doubled to 21%, and we can see that the amount has been slowly increasing since then.
The termination rate in June was 36%. That’s high. Or is it?
To answer that last question, we need to look at TRREB regions.
Here’s the 416:
The 416 saw a 7% termination rate in January, which is in line with the 8% figure TRREB-wide.
But that’s the only real similarity.
As the termination rate in TRREB increased to 36% by June, it was a mere 20% in the 416.
This must mean that other TRREB regions have been hit harder, right?
Here’s Durham Region:
In both May and June, Durham Region saw a 40% termination rate, compared to 33% and 36% TRREB-wide.
Believe it or not, Durham was not the hardest hit. That was York Region:
39% in May, 41% in June, and that averages out at 40%, to pull even with Durham Region, but the 35% recorded in April is 2% higher than Durham, and keep in mind – the 416 was only 13%!
Here’s Peel Region:
This is more of the same.
So too is Halton Region, which traces Peel quite closely:
All told, it seems to me that the “suburbs” are seeing far more terminations than the 416.
This jives with what we’ve all heard about failed offer nights, price reductions, and new listing after new listing in Durham, Halton, Peel, and York.
The contrast between these areas and the 416 is shocking, but some might suggest it’s simply not.
In booming times, all real estate in a greater city area is attractive and it’s all hot.
But when the market turns, the central core of any major city always holds its value better, and I don’t expect that to ever change.
Looking at month-to-month fluctuations in the termination rate, and comparing and contrasting TRREB regions is one thing, but how do we really know if this data should look any different than it does?
To answer that, we’d have to compare to 2021. So that’s what we’ll do next!
Here’s the GTA data for 2021:
Note that January and February’s 10% and 11% are actually higher than 2022’s figures of 8% and 10%.
That’s because 2022 was hotter than 2021, and it seems to reason that there would be fewer terminations.
But the 21% recorded in March of 2022 was well ahead of the 16% from March of 2022.
And the 33% and 36% recorded in May and June of 2022 were way beyond the 20% and 22% recorded in the same time periods in 2021.
This is how we determine if the termination rate in the past few months is “high.”
We know it’s “high” in Durham, York, Peel, and Halton – compared to the 416.
But now we know it’s high in general, having compared it to 2021.
I have the same charts for the five major TRREB regions for 2021, but you don’t want to scroll back up to compare, nor do you want me to write out a slew of percentages.
To truly compare 2021 to 2022, we’ll want to graph these!
Here’s the GTA as a whole:
We noted above how the termination rate was higher in January and February, and then the spread began in March.
But when we look at the 416, the graph is completely different:
I say “completely” for those who will give this more than a cursory view, but note how the lines began to diverge for the GTA-wide termination rate in the month of March, but it took until May to see this in the 416.
Also note that the spread in the month of June is massive in the GTA compared to the 416.
Here’s Durham Region:
How interesting that the termination rate declined from April to May of 2021 (if we’re going to two decimal places…), and thus our blue line looks different than expected.
But damn, look at the gap!
While the termination rate tapered off slightly in June of 2022, and it actually increased in June of 2021, that gap is massive.
Halton Region tells just about the same story:
The gap between the termination rate in June 2021 and 2022 in Durham Region was a full 20%.
But in Halton, it’s “only” 16%, as we saw a 23% termination rate in June of 2021 and a 39% termination rate in June of 2022.
In fact, all the suburb regions tell a similar story.
Whereas the gap in termination rate, June 2021 versus June 2022, was a mere 5% in the 416-Toronto region, it’s anywhere from 15-20% in the suburbs.
Here’s York Region:
That’s a 15% gap in June; from 26% in June of 2021 to a whopping 41% in June of 2022.
For those playing along at home, 41% is the largest termination rate in any area, in any month, in either 2021 or 2022, January to June.
That figure is just astounding.
If you’re a seller in York Region, you have to know that – on average, you have a 41% chance of listing your property a second time, or simply taking it off the market.
Last, but not least, Peel Region:
Note that all four suburb Regions saw the “crossover” in February, whereas the 416-Toronto area saw the crossover in March.
The spread between termination rates in June, 2021 versus 2022, is 15%.
So if we want to use last month – June, as an indicator, we’ll look at the respective spreads in termination rate, June of 2021 versus June of 2022:
Toronto: 5%
Peel: 15%
York: 15%
Halton: 15%
Durham: 20%
Or if you want to put this another way, consider that in June, the termination rate in the 416-Toronto area was 20%, compared to 41% in York Region.
Any way you want to look at this data, you’ll draw two conclusions:
1) Terminated listings are skyrocketing
2) The 416-Toronto region is in a completely different world than Peel, York, Halton, and Durham.
For some you, the preceding was incredibly boring. I get it.
But for others, you know where I’m coming from, and perhaps a refresher next week, when we have the July data, would be helpful. Maybe not in the form of a full blog post, but I expect the TRREB Market Watch to be released on Friday, August 5th, so I’ll get my monthly stats blog up for Monday, and we’ll look at the termination rate.
Now, up for debate: it’s 11:45pm and you’re laying on the couch, randomly flipping channels. You find Con Air on one channel, and The Rock on another. Both movies are about halfway through. Which do you watch, and why?
Eddie
at 7:15 am
The Rock, mainly because of Sean Connery.
David
at 10:24 am
Con Air because of John Malkovich & Steve Buscemi.
Although Cage’s horrible southern accent is a significant anchor on the film.
Sirgruper
at 5:25 pm
Agreed. Bang on.
Running Man? At least Richard Dawson saved it. Terminator was something when it came out. You still had action movies before but a different style, Bond/Clint Eastwood or person favourite The French Connection (but I am dating myself).
Sam
at 7:44 am
Twins
Kindergarten Cop
Junior
Jingle All The Way
Four reasons why Arnie is definitely not the greatest action film star of all time.
David Fleming
at 9:29 am
@ Sam
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not. What movie was filmed in between Twins and Kindergarten Cop? Totall Recall. Just think about that. Arnold breaks out of his “action star” role to film Twins with Danny DeVito, then does Total Recall, then plays a Kindergarten teacher in the next film. What’s not to love about that?
“Who is your daddy, and what does he do?”
One of the most infamous movie quotes of the 1990’s!
Sam
at 11:15 am
You said action star.
Now you’re claiming that Scharzenegger’s comedic and dramatic acting skills augment his ability to fire a grenade launcher.
Pick a lane.
FOe what it’s worth I would have said Tom Cruise before you sarcastically cast him aside. I’m sure you saw Top Gun 2? What was the last Arnold movie you saw in the theatre?
David Fleming
at 4:17 pm
@ Sam
So you’re going to disregard any actor that’s ever appeared in anything OTHER than action movies?
Will Smith doesn’t count – credited with Independance Day, Bad Boys, Men In Black, Wild Wild West, I Robot, I Am Legend, Hancock, et al because he did Six Degrees of Separation?
I don’t know how old you are, but I was born in 1980. I remember how big Arnold Schwarzenegger was back then, and I remember that every year, there was an “Arnold action movie.” Everybody wanted to know what it was. Everybody wanted to see it. No matter what, it was huge.
The lineup for True Lies was around the block. You can’t imagine what it was like seeing that in the theatre and just how big a deal it was.
Post-Conan era, he gave us Terminator, Commando, Predator, Running Man, Terminator 2, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, Last Action Hero, and Eraser, all in a decade, and all were massive, all are cult-classics to this day.
Tom Cruise? Yes, he’s a massive action star. But he did the same movie over and over; Mission Impossible. Top Gun 2 was incredible and it was the first movie I saw in the theatre since January of 2020. Tom Cruise may be an insane scientologist and an egomaniac, but his dedication to his craft is unparallelled:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5GTOWDlfWo
That’s the behind the scenes of how Top Gun 2 was filmed. He didn’t hire the actors in the film until they had “passed” his training.
However, as great as Jack Reacher 1 & 2 were, along Mission Impossible 1-through-hoewever-many, no action star can ever have the effect that Arnold Schwarzenegger had on the film-going public from 1984 through 1995.
Sam
at 10:55 am
In order for an action star to be great, don’t the movies have to be any good??
Look at movies like Predator today and compare it to something like Black Panther, Captain America, Avengers, anything by Marvel. There’s no comparison.
I could argue that Robert Downey Jr is a bigger action star because of the Iron Man movies which are all superior to Arnie’s films, made more money at the box office, and had worldwide attention.
David Fleming
at 11:18 am
@ Sam
I honestly don’t know if I can dignify this with a response.
How can you compare a 1987 film to a 2018 film and take issue with the difference in technology?
Also, I don’t consider this Marvel Studios bullshit to be “films.” They’re cartoons. These aren’t actors. They wear costumes and stand in front of a green screen, then the footage is sent to a lab where tens of millions of dollars are spent on CGI on computers to edit everything together.
I’m not a fan of any of these new superhero movies as they’re basically glorified cartoons.
In any event, your argument that “old movies” and “actors from yesteryear” are no longer considered great because CGI elevatates “actors” like Robert Downey Jr. to greatness is so misguided. Shall we say that Marlon Brando’s performance in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is now considered terrible because there was no superimposed dragon flying over Stella? The French Connection won best picture in 1972 but it’s a bad movie because nobody wore a cape.
All movies filmed in Black & White are awful because colour films were not yet invented.
(END SCENE)
John Matrix
at 3:28 pm
Let off some steam Sam!
Condodweller
at 4:14 pm
Total Recall was another great one. Those video walls are getting close to reality now.
If you like Arnold as an action start how about the Expandables series with all the action starts from the 80s/90s. I mean all of them. It would be a good trivia for what action star wasn’t in those. Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Sly Stallone, even Jet Li, and of course Arnold. The only one I don’t see is Jean-Claude but I think he was in the sequels.
Libertarian
at 9:02 am
Roadhouse on AMC. It’s always on.
I’m not a fan of Nic Cage.
David Fleming
at 11:20 am
@ Libertarian
I’m not a fan of Nic Cage, per se. But Con Air, The Rock, and Face/Off all inside of 18 months was an incredible haul of action movies in the ’90’s!
JL
at 11:28 am
I thought we had a similar poll a year or so ago and David confirmed “The Rock” as his favorite (which also lined up with the group consensus at the time; Connery + Ed Harris just put it over the top).
Mxyzptlk
at 12:30 pm
Certainly Tom Cruise is emphatically not “the greatest action-movie actor of all time,” it could be argued that he’s only barely “an actor” at all. Just one person’s opinion.
J G
at 1:23 pm
July numbers are out! https://twitter.com/IGorbadei/status/1554105032945111046
416 Detached down 13.1% MoM and 6.6% YoY, wow!
Condodweller
at 4:01 pm
Great analysis and graphs.
Laserdiscs were a spectacular failure eh? Here’s a bit of history as long as you brought up the subject. Laserdiscs, or their predecessor discovision (how many have heard of that?) started out in 1978. Pioneer later renamed it to laservision and called the discs laserdisc. They had almost double the horizontal lines of VHS which produced a dramatically better picture on even a larger 27″ CRT TV never mind on a “large” screen rear projection TV like your Dad’s. BTW people spent thousands of $$ on line doublers or triplers to make watching a VHS movie on a large screen bearable while a laserdisc player offered twice the resolution starting at around $400 natively. Even DVD was only a small improvement of about 50 additional horizontal lines so laserdisc was a big deal to movie fans. Another little-known fact is that laserdiscs are not digital which means they had uncompressed video. This is why a movie didn’t fit on one side of a disc. It also came standard with dolby pro-logic soundtrack for most movies which was an amazing improvement over stereo (or mono on tv) providing enveloping sound resulting in an immersive experience. The analog sound quality is still considered better than the compressed audio you find on dvds by many enthusiasts. My first encounter was a demo of Top Gun on a projection screen. Top Gun was a great demo disc for surround sound with the jets blasting around the room. The biggest reason for the end of laserdiscs was its cost and the size of the discs hence the success of dvds followed by blu ray players. It was quite the opposite of a spectacular failure. Dvd/blu ray players exist because of laserdisc. Think of dvd/blu ray as LD 2.0/3.0.
The big advantage of VHS over laserdisc was the recording capability of VHS. Though from what I heard it was possible for LD, it wasn’t implemented I’m guessing because the main use for LD was movies and the studios probably didn’t want anything to do with high-quality movie recording. This is why we get to deal with DHCP in all our current equipment.
Regarding short-lived, Pioneer stopped making players in 2008. That’s a 30-year span.
Jurrasic Park was another big demo disc for LD and its sound capabilities. In the later years, they even added ac3 5.1 dolby digital to LD. I actually own Top Gun with DD5.1.
T2 was one sequel I can think of that was better than the original. That’s not to take away from T1, or just T, but the sound and graphic effects were unreal in that movie not to mention the storyline. I mean the twist that Arnold was there to save John and Sarah Connor was gold.
BTW one of my best Arnold movies was True Lies. I’m glad to see the genre of action comedy being revived. The Gray Man and Red Notice were both great on netflix but True Lies is still better. I’m probably going to age myself here but the first movies I saw Arnold in were Connan the barbarian and Connan the destroyer.
Please tell me that as a movie fan you at least have a sound bar with a sub.
Derek
at 8:38 pm
True Lies is a true gem.
David Fleming
at 11:12 am
@ Condodweller
Laser-disc players were not a “spectacular failure” from a technology standpoint. But they were a spectacular failure from a commercial standpoint, since they never caught on.
I remember being in Blockbuster video in Park City, Utah, circa 1996, and begging my Dad to purchase “Speed” on laser-disc. Do you know how much it cost? $99.99. That was in USD, which was about $140 CAD back then. With inflation, what’s that today? $200?
No techology was going to catch on at $200 a pop. It was insane for manufacturers to think this would or could work.
My home theatre setup is quite poor. You’ll hate this, but here goes: when I bought my house, there was a wall in the basement that was long enough to display my five autographed hockey jerseys (Richard, Howe, Orr, Gretzky, Lemieux), but it was the wall with the built-in TV console and in-ceiling speakers. I had the front/back switched so I could put my jerseys on that wall, but I didn’t switch the speakers. So now, I have two rear speakers in the ceiling above the TV, and three front speakers over the couch where we sit. Not a proud moment..
Condodweller
at 1:39 pm
David, the way it went down was that LD was a great success among videophile movie enthusiasts but the industry soon realized that the average person is never going to pay $40+ per disc never mind $400+ for a new player when the VCR was perfectly adequate for them. I think this would have changed if large screens infiltrated homes sooner as less than 300 horizontal lines looked terible on large screens. In a way, LD was ahead of its time. Then they started working on a smaller CD-like, cheaper disc i.e. DVD. If they didn’t come out with DVDs I’m sure the LD would still live very happily today as a niche. Though you might have to flip the disk more than once(later players could switch sides) with HD for uncompressed video. I mean it lasted about 10 years into DVDs and I read the only reason Pioneer stopped making players was because they couldn’t source parts for them. One of the big reasons LD never caught on besides the disc price was that no rental store would carry them. Had they been more widely available to rent, I think more people would have purchased players. Bay Street video was the only rental dedicated to LD that had a huge selection. Oh, the benefit was that the latest and greatest movie was usually available on LD while you had to wait for the HVS copy for days. Those were the days. When trekked down to your VHS rental store and they didn’t have a copy of the movie you wanted to watch you found something else and hoped it was in the next time you went. How would today’s instant gratification crowd survive?
Priorities on the TV wall. I would install a drop-down screen so you can watch movies when you are done looking at your jerseys. You had me at in ceiling speakers LOL.
Mathlete
at 9:22 am
I humbly put forward the Keanu Reeves oeuvre and the classic work of the late Steve McQueen for inclusion in the action hero pantheon.
Also, in some of the termination rate results, I think you may be confusing percent increase with an increase in percentage points, which are very different things.
For example: “That’s a 15% gap in June; from 26% in June of 2021 to a whopping 41% in June of 2022.”
This isn’t a 15% gap; it’s a gap of 15 percentage points. And that gap represents an increase of nearly 60%. Big, big difference.
Percentage change is the difference between two data points, divided by the original data point, multiplied by 100 — so in this case (41 minus 26 = 15), 15 divided by 26 = .5769, x 100 = 57.69%. (Good summary here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/percentage-change.asp)
That means the termination rate increased by almost 60% from June 2021 to June 2022.
Similarly, the increase for the 416 is significantly higher than a gap of “a mere 5%.” A change from 15% terminations to 20% terminations is actually a 33% increase in the termination rate YoY. (Difference between 20% and 15% = 5. Divide that by 15 = .33333 and multiply by 100 = 33%.)
The graphs clearly show this — the gaps between red and blue are definitely larger than 15% and 5% differences.
Finally, by my (admittedly biased) calculations, the car chase in Bullitt is 82% better than the chase in Terminator 2.
David Fleming
at 11:20 am
@ Mathlete
Better car chase scenes: The French Connection, Bullitt, or Ronin?
Mathlete
at 12:35 pm
Doubling down on Bullitt: the trip through San Francisco, that green Mustang, the lack of any soundtrack except engines and tires, and the visceral sense of being there on those steep hills.
Condodweller
at 2:12 pm
@David/Mathlete
I watched the French connection and I don’t recall a car scene. Bullitt, I don’t know if I ever watched the entire movie or just checked out the car scene but I have no idea what that movie is about. For me, you can’t have car chases just for the sake of having one. It needs to fit the movie. T2 is a perfect example. BTW the chase that stands out for me is the one with Arnold on the Harley single-handed as he shoots at the tractor (less trailer) and when the Terminator chases Arnold and co at the end in the delivery van.
I was going to comment before David that Ronin is the best car chase scene that I recall.
Speaking of The expendables and Keanu, I put on Expandables 3 last night in the background and checked out its IMDB entry and it’s insane what a parade of stars the series has. Not only action heroes but your average stars like Mel Gibson, Woody Harelson, Kelsey Grammer, Robert Davi, and I totally missed Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and that is still not all.
What’s interesting is the trivia section for the movie. If you ever don’t know what to watch and need some ideas just throw a dart at the movies listed there. Aside from who was in the movie, there is a list of who Stallone wanted but couldn’t get like Jack Nicholson, Jackie Chan, etc. Where is Keanu in all this you ask? Well, he is in the 4th one. Yes, even though it was supposed to be a series of three, the fourth one is coming out next year, and Neo is in it.
I think at some point actors are going to be falling over themselves to be in one of these. One day we’ll look back and we’ll be astounded by the star power packed into this movie that I’m going to guess fewer people have heard of than a laserdisc.
Mxyzptlk
at 8:14 pm
If I remember correctly, the scene in The French Connection that people talk about isn’t a “car chase” scene as such. Popeye Doyle has “commandeered” some poor schmuck’s car and is chasing the suspect, who’s in an elevated train racing along above the street. Doyle is constantly looking up at the train, meaning he comes within inches of smashing into pedestrians, fruit carts, baby carriages, etc. It’s quite a scene, but I’d still vote for “Bullitt.”
Appraiser
at 8:15 am
Remember when the scourge of “blind-bidding” was a thing?