Michael Ponte asked our community how tariffs would hit real estate. I gave him a coffee emoji. Here is the real answer. Part 1 of a four-part series.
A weekend morning, a couple of weeks back. Michael Ponte, who leads the Savvy Investors Facebook group, one of the most prominent real estate investing communities in the country, asked the room this.
HOW & WILL TARIFFS IMPACT REAL ESTATE?
It’s all over the news this morning so I thought we’d have a healthy discussion about it as a community.
With new tariffs kicking in, how do you think this will play out in your real estate investing markets?
Share in the comments and tell us your market.
Fair question. Good question. Exactly the question a room full of investors should be asking each other on a morning like that one.
Here is what I typed back.
“Thoughts? Lots of them… It’s a beautiful morning, and enjoying a nice cup of coffee ☕”
Twenty six years in this business. A direct question about my own field, from my own community.
And I gave him a coffee emoji.
That was not a busy morning. That was a dodge.
Sorry, Michael. You asked a real question. You deserved a real answer.
Here it is.
I did not want the news to ruin my weekend, so I typed something light and went back to my coffee.
It ruined my weekend anyway.
It sat on me all day. Still there the next morning. And I could not work out why, because I have read a lot of bad economic news in 26 years and most of it does not follow me around the house.
Then I got it.
I was not reading a trade story. I was watching two friends fight.
Out-Separating
You know the couple I mean. The good ones. The ones you actually like being around. The ones you genuinely love and care about.
And they hit a rough patch. Maybe even a trial separation. And instead of doing the quiet, unglamorous, hard work of the relationship, they take the whole thing public.
Both of them start posting. Both of them start performing.
Look how great I am without you. Look how fine I am. Look who is having more fun.
Something I call “out-separating.” A contest to prove which one is better off single.
Nobody is trying to fix anything at that point. Both parties are trying to WIN. To be the one who was right. To make the other one the villain in the story their friends are hearing.
Here is the ironic part. The part that is genuinely hard to watch.
You know how good they are for each other. You have seen it up close, for years. You know they are soulmates.
That is what weighs on you. Not the fighting.
The waste.
And here is what you already know if you have ever watched it happen from the outside.
Both parties are right. And both parties are wrong.
He has a list. She has a list. Both lists are accurate.
It changes nothing.
I used this exact lens back in April, in One More Boom. Fifteen hard years, trust eroded, fights about money, both sides feeling unheard. I was pointing it inward then, at Alberta and the rest of this country.
Same fork in the road.
Different marriage.
The Kids Always Pay
I am not making light of what any couple actually goes through. Real separations are devastating and private and I am not putting anybody’s pain beside a tariff schedule.
But the analogy holds where it counts.
In those really hard moments, good people say and do things that are nowhere near their nature. Things they would never say on a normal Tuesday. Hurt people hurt people. That is not an excuse. It is just what happens when something you love is coming apart.
And it always starts small. An inside joke. A bit of humour with an edge on it. Then the other side has to top it. Then somebody has to top that.
Out-ridiculous each other.
That is the phase we are in right now, and I am not speaking in metaphor.
A Great Lake got renamed by executive order. Official accounts started mocking the other side’s military online. The premier of our largest province stood in front of cameras and told the President he had “a lot of real estate on my ass” and plenty of room to kiss it. I have spent 26 years in real estate and that is the first listing I have ever wanted no part of. A prime minister then had to say, out loud, to a neighbouring government, “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade.” The reply was an AI video of a road sign getting kicked over.
Read that paragraph again and tell me it is about trade.
Both sides. Both lists. Both escalating.
No talks are scheduled. None. Two countries that have never once needed a wall between them are not speaking, and the last few exchanges were memes.
This is no laughing matter. Somewhere in all the escalating, getting the last word quietly became the objective. Everybody forgot the thing they were supposedly fighting for.
And in every public split, the people who take the damage are the ones who were never at the table.
The kids. The ones downstream who did not get a vote and cannot leave the house.
Somebody finally counted them. About 45,000 Canadian companies export to the United States. Roughly 30,000 of them export nowhere else. Around $400 billion in sales. Close to two million jobs, direct and indirect.
That is us.
Talks collapsed in Washington on August 21 after three days at the table. 50% American tariffs landed on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. Ottawa’s answer, dollar for dollar, landed September 8. Steel. Appliances. Agricultural equipment. Dairy. Pulp, paper, electronics.
Ottawa says the ask was too big and the offer was too small. Washington says Canada walked back terms that had already been agreed.
Two lists. Both accurate.
Nobody pouring concrete.
Then I Went And Reread Something I Wrote In April
That is when the weekend really went sideways.
Back in April I wrote about the Davos speech, in a post called The Puck Is on Our Stick. I had mixed feelings and I listed them out. One of them was this:
“… Taking a big stand against the US BUT did we just give our largest customer the middle finger (75%+ of our exports)?”
Another one asked whether we had overplayed our hand and overestimated our own importance in the world.
I did not have answers in April. I had questions.
And reading them back that weekend, with the tariff lists open in the next tab, I did not feel clever.
I felt sick.
There is a version of this post where I take a lap for asking the right question early. That version is worthless to you, and it is not who I am.
Nobody gets a trophy for worrying about the right thing.
So in the next article I am going back to those four questions. Not to grade them, it is far too early for that and this is moving in real time. Just to ask, honestly, where each one stands now. Four months and one collapsed negotiation later.
Why I Could Not Answer That Morning
Everybody is picking a camp right now. Everybody has a flag. And the entire game online is to make your side right and the other side wrong.
That is why I went quiet. Not because I had nothing to say. Because every version of the answer I had in my head that morning was just me joining a camp.
And camps are the wrong question.
You can win the argument and lose the relationship.
There is a scoreboard everyone is watching right now. Who landed the better jab. Who looked stronger on camera. Who got the bigger cheer.
It is not the scoreboard that pays.
Roughly $2.7 billion in goods and services cross that border every single day. Canada is the number one export destination for 36 American states. We share the longest unprotected border on earth, and that is not an accident. Somebody built that. Generations of somebodies.
We are better together. We have always been better together. I do not think that is naive. I think that is just the arithmetic.
So what do I actually want?
Both parties off social media. Both parties in a room. Door closed, phones away, a good counsellor in the chair, and the slow unglamorous work the relationship deserves.
This is too important for jokes and jabs.
And The Timeout Applies To Me
Easy to prescribe a social media timeout for two governments. Harder to take one.
I gave a full week of my attention to a negotiation I have no seat in. No vote. No phone call. Not one inch of influence.
And I typed a coffee emoji about it while it quietly ate my weekend.
So here is what I am doing. And what I would ask you to do.
1. Feel it, then put it down. You are allowed to care about this. It matters. Pretending it does not is exactly what I tried that weekend morning, and it did not hold for a single hour. Name the thing. Then close the app.
2. Go find the place where YOU would rather be right. This whole post is about two parties who would sooner win the argument than keep the relationship. Before any of us point at Ottawa or Washington, go find our own version. The sibling you stopped talking to. The business relationship that needs reworking rather than winning. The contract or the negotiation where you have been holding a line more out of principle than out of sense. Where has being right already cost you more than the argument was ever worth? You do not have to fix it tonight. Just name it, quietly, to yourself.
3. Go back and answer the question properly. Whatever thread you scrolled past this week, go put your real read in the comments. Name your market. Name what you are actually seeing on the ground, not what you saw on the news. That is what a community is for, and I did not hold up my end of it that morning.
Number 2 is the one that matters.
Do that one tonight.
Where This Goes
That group asked how tariffs will play out in our markets. This post was not the answer. This post was why the question stopped me cold.
Over the next three articles I am answering it properly. Where those four April questions stand today. Why we may need a few more friends in this world and what that actually looks like. And what I have actually learned to do when nobody, including me, knows how a thing ends.
Because I do think something good comes out of this. I really do.
We are BFFs having a bad month.
Bad months end.
I believe in you. And I believe in us.
The Rough Patch: A Four-Part Series
Part 1: The Fight (you are here)
Part 2: Four Questions (next)
Part 3: Other Friends
Part 4: Nobody Knows. Do The Work Anyway.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
