CANADIAN LAND BOOM.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 11 December 1913, Page 4

CANADIAN LAND BOOM.

warnings are being published against what may be called absentee speculation in Canadian land, that the British investor has even less excuse than he used to have for buying land he has not seen. The latest is perhaps more impressive than others, because it emanates from an official body, the Chamber of Commerce of Fernie, a British Columbian mining town. "Real estate swindling," says a bulletin issued by the Chamber, "has been reduced to a science. Many of the big realty corporations issue instructions to their agents, showing just how the 'sucker' is to be hooked. They teach their agents how to play on the weaknesses of human nature to get the money of those who can be persuaded without seeing." Many ".suburban" subdivisions that are hawked about are, parts of farms. The land was bought for'from £3 to £3O an acre, and cut up into "graveyard lots," and is being sold at from £2O to £3O per lot to people who take the agents' word for its value. These general statements are supported by the testimony of people in particular cases. A man bought allotments on the representation of an agent that they were two blocks away from the post office in a certain town, and found that they were four miles out. ' "1 know of property selling at £2OO per acre that stands upon a precipitous bluff unapproachable except by balloon," says a resident of another town. ". . . Unless a man can build on the perpendicular side of a sandcliff, I fail"tb see what value, even remote value, these parcels of land can have." The Fernie Chamber of Commerce advises people not to buy unimproved real estate at all now, for all "sub-division stuff" is on the down grade, and within the next few years a lot of it will be sold to pay taxes. The' warning is one of a number of indications that the Western Canadian land boom has burst.