The crystal ball is broken. For everyone, mine included. So the real skill was never the real estate forecast… it’s what you do with all of them.
Let me tell you who’s actually talking, because it should change how you hear this.
I’m not a pundit. I’m an investor with my own money in the game, a real dog in the hunt. I study these markets like it’s my job, because it is, and I share what I find with anyone who wants to listen. That’s the whole arrangement. No pedestal, no crystal ball for sale.
So before I hand you a way to weigh anyone’s market read, let me hand you mine. Including the parts I’d grade myself down on.
February 2021. I started calling clients and telling them to pull chips off the table, specifically out of Ontario and BC. Sell. Trim. Take the gain while it was sitting right there in front of them. Not a popular thing to say with the market on fire and everyone buying. A few of them later told me I was the only voice in their world saying sell.
Around that same stretch I went on the Rockstar podcast and said downtown Toronto condos were going to be ground zero for a world of pain. That one’s aging in plain sight right now.
Felt good to be early on both. I won’t pretend it didn’t.
But here’s the part nobody sends a thank-you card for…
On the sell call, I was about a year early. And honestly, too quiet. I said it in private calls. I didn’t shout it from the rooftop. I had a read I believed in and I half-whispered it.
So take this from a guy with a real, public, and very imperfect record. That’s not a disclaimer. That’s the whole point of the piece.
Anybody Can Call the Rain Once They’re Already Wet
Here’s what nobody wants to admit about real estate forecasts.
Today is the easiest day in history to be right about today.
Anybody can tell you to grab an umbrella when it’s already pouring. The call worth anything is the one made under a blue sky, when “a storm’s coming” makes you sound crazy and earns you exactly zero thank-yous.
Through 2021 and into 2022, the sky looked perfect. Prices ripping. Everyone a genius. Money cheap. FOMO thick in the air. That was the precise moment caution made you the idiot in the room.
So here’s your first filter. Not what is this person saying now. What were they saying then?
Go pull it up. The webinars, the emails, the videos, the posts. It’s all still there, the internet doesn’t forget. Find out what they were telling you to BUY at the top.
But Here’s the Trap I Almost Walked You Into
If I stopped there, I’d be handing you a clean little story. Find the people who called it, trust them forever, ignore everyone else.
That’s a lie. A comfortable one, but a lie.
Because here’s the truth I’ve earned the hard way over almost 30 years…
The crystal ball is broken. Everybody’s. Mine included.
Nobody knows what’s coming. Not the economists, not the gurus, not the guy with the newsletter, and not me. The ones who nailed 2022 will get something else dead wrong. The ones who blew 2022 will call the next one perfectly. Anyone selling you certainty about the future is selling you a feeling dressed up as a forecast.
So please. Do not walk away from this and go find a shiny new oracle to outsource your brain to. Including me. Don’t lean too hard on anyone’s forecast, mine least of all.
So What Do You Actually Do With All of It?
This is the part that matters, and almost nobody teaches it.
You stop shopping for the one voice that’s always right, because that voice does not exist. Then you do the harder, quieter work.
Take in ALL of it. Every credible read you can get your hands on. Then run it through the only filter that actually counts… your situation, your portfolio, your life, your risk, your timeline. Keep what genuinely resonates with where you actually are. Throw out the rest, no matter how confident the person saying it sounded. Then make YOUR call and own it.
The forecasters are inputs. You are the decision.
The moment that clicks, you stop being a passenger hunting for a better driver, and you become the one steering.
Now Watch Me Do the Exact Thing I Just Warned You About
Here’s where you get to call me out.
I just spent four paragraphs telling you not to trust forecasts. And now I’m going to make one. Loudly. Feel the tension? Good. Sit in it with me, because how I handle it IS the lesson.
Let me go deeper on that 2021 call, because the detail is everything. I wasn’t telling people to sell EVERYTHING and run for the hills. I was being surgical. Sell your Ontario and your BC, where the people were starting to leave and the math had quietly stopped working. Because you don’t invest in the national number. Nobody lives in the national average. You invest in regions, in cities, in the actual streets where the moving trucks are pulling up.
So no, I’m not a bear. I’m not negative across the board. Watch where I’m pointing.
I’m cautious to flat-out bearish on a handful of overheated, people-are-leaving markets. Downtown Toronto condos, still.
And I am all-in, hardcore, zero hedging on Alberta. Edmonton especially. The people are voting with moving trucks and they’re voting west. The jobs are there. The affordability is there. The growth is there. I’ve put it in writing across an entire research series, and my own money agrees with my mouth.
So how is that not the exact hypocrisy I just warned you about?
Because I’m not handing you a prediction and asking you to obey it. I’m handing you a read, with the reasoning attached, the receipts attached, and my own neck attached. That is a completely different animal than “trust me, it’ll go up.”
A forecast you’re asked to swallow is a religion. A read you’re shown how to check is a tool. Take mine as a tool. Then go find out if it fits YOUR life, not mine.
One Thing I Will Defend: Experience Is Not Evenly Distributed
“Take it all in” does not mean every voice weighs the same. It doesn’t.
This is the one place I plant a flag.
Think about pro sports. Brutal, short shelf life. You’re elite in your twenties and mostly finished by your mid-thirties. The clock is the enemy.
Real estate investing runs the exact opposite direction. Your sharpest, most valuable years don’t even START until you’re twenty-plus years in. That’s when the lessons from every cycle you actually survived finally compound. The run-ups, the corrections, the “this time it’s different” that wasn’t, the panic that turned out to be the opportunity. You can’t cram that. You can only log it, one cycle at a time.
So weight your inputs accordingly. A read from someone who has invested their own money through multiple cycles is worth more than a confident take from someone who’s only ever watched the market go up.
Not because they can predict the future. Nobody can. Because they’ve felt more of the past, and they’re a lot harder to fool.
And One Last Tell, Because It Matters Most
Whoever you’re weighing, watch for this one.
The tell isn’t being wrong. It’s hiding it.
The person who screamed “buy everything” in 2022 and now says “well, I always knew it would correct”… that’s the tell. Not the miss. The quiet edit. The slow rewrite so they look sharp in the rearview.
The person who owns the miss out loud just earned MORE of your trust, not less. Because honesty about their past is the only honest signal you’ll ever get about how to weigh their future.
Do This Tonight
Not next quarter. Tonight. Twenty minutes.
- Make the list. Every voice you currently take seriously about your money. The gurus, the podcasters, your Realtor, your broker, the loud guy in your mastermind. Put me on it too.
- Pull their 2021-2022 tape. Find what they told you to buy at the top, then check whether they owned it after.
- Weight by cycles, not confidence. Who has actually invested their own money through more than one market? Move their read up. Move the never-seen-a-downturn crowd down.
- Then do the real work. Gather the best reads you can find, run them hard against YOUR actual situation, keep only what resonates, and make your own call. Out loud. On paper. Yours.
Run every bit of this on me too. Feb 2021, sell Ontario and BC. Toronto condos, ground zero. All-in on Alberta today. Some of it early, one call too quiet, my crystal ball as cracked as anybody’s. That’s my tape. Now you know exactly how to read it, and exactly how much to lean on it.
Last Thing
None of this is meant to turn you into a cynic who trusts no one. The opposite.
It’s so you can stop handing your future to somebody else’s broken crystal ball, gather the sharpest reads you can find, weight them by real scars, and then trust the one forecaster who actually has to live with the result.
You.
I believe you’re sharp enough to do exactly that. I always have.
P.S. If you’d value a second set of eyes weighing your own portfolio’s inputs against where the people are actually moving, that’s exactly what I do on a no-pressure consult call. Grab a time here.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire # Encourage #Love
