Real Estate Prices Fall

There's good news for anyone looking to buy a home. The latest real estate numbers show it's a buyers market and that's not going to change anytime soon. Consumer confidence and house prices continued to fall in October.

Over the past six months, the price of a home in Greater Vancouver has dropped 8.8 per cent. In May, the residential benchmark price was nearly $570,000 in Greater Vancouver. Last month, it didn't quite hit $520,000.

Over the past year, the most drastic drop has been seen in West Vancouver. The price of a typical home there is now just over $1.1 million. That's down 21.6 per cent this October compared to October of 2007.

The price drops appear to be driven in part by buyers, who are playing the waiting game. They don't have competition for many properties and there are many more properties than buyers. To put this in perspective, the overall drop in the past six months still puts us within about 5 per cent of the all time high.

Put another way, prices of houses, condos and townhouses today are still more than double what they were just seven years ago. So while price drops make them more affordable,  it doesn't mean we can afford to buy.

Fast Oven

Looking for good food fast? There's a new oven that promises to cook your favourite recipes in record time.

To test its claims we put a frozen pizza in the Turbochef Speedcook double wall oven. At $9,000 it claims it can cook a 12 pound turkey in just 42 minutes, using convection and microwave technology.

It also promises five-star results. That sure would be a crowd pleaser

Consumer Reports testers picked up a couple of turkeys, as close to 12 pounds that they could find.

One went into the Turbochef Speed-Cook oven. The other was cooked in an Electrolux Wave Touch convection oven, which has a perfect turkey setting and promises up to 30 per cent faster cooking times than conventional range ovens.

The Electrolux is a smooth top electric that ranks among the best range ovens we've tested. And at just $2,000,  it costs much less than the Speedcook.

The Turbochef turkey was done in a blistering 53 minutes, compared with 98 for the Electrolux. That's 45 minutes faster!

And the results pleased Consumer Reports' resident chef John Macchia.

"The turkey from the Turbochef was moist and juicy," he said.

So the Turbochef doesn't sacrifice quality for speed. It's also a smart oven, that does a lot of thinking for you.

To cook biscuits you just cycle through the options and pop them in the oven.

Two and a half minutes later they are done to perfection.

Still some people don't believe this oven will work on their family recipes. So one Vancouver store has a solution.

"We very much encourage consumers who are interested in the oven to bring down a proven and favorite recipe of their own and try it out in the oven and see the results for themselves. That way they can see how the technology works," said Steve Raben of Coast Wholesale Appliances.

Remember the frozen pizza? In the time it took to tell you this story, it was done to bubbling perfection.

With a report by CTV British Columbia's Chris Olsen