August 20 – Italy’s Serie A has built on its crypto relationship with Crypto.com who will become the first Innovation & Technology Partner of the league in what Serie A is calling a multi-year partnership.
Crypto.com will be the presenting partner of Serie As Virtual Assistant Referee (VAR) and Goal Line Technology. Lega Serie A’s VAR Center in Lissone will also be co-branded as the Crypto.com VAR Center.
Crypto.com sponsored Serie A’s Coppa Italia in May of this year, and created an NFT collection related to the final between Atalanta and Juventus. The new deal will see further NFT collections built for Serie A, Coppa Italia and Supercoppa Italiana.
“We are very happy and honoured by this important partnership with Crypto.com, a leading cryptocurrency company that has chosen Lega Serie A to develop increasingly engaging products for all the fans of Italian football,” said Luigi De Siervo, CEO of Lega Serie A.
Crypto.com has more than 10 million users worldwide and is a top-ten finance app in both the App Store and Google Play. The Crypto.com Visa Card is the world’s most popular crypto card available in over 30 countries.
“We are extremely proud to deepen our partnership with Lega Serie A to enhance the fan experience with technology and innovation at the core,” said Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com. “Since its introduction, VAR has brought greater transparency and reliability to football, features which we value deeply at Crypto.com.”
Serie A was the first league to introduce VAR in 2017. Last season Serie A saw a total of 2,372 incidents referred to VAR. VAR interventions are included in Lega Serie A’s global broadcast reaching more than 1 billion people worldwide in 191 countries. All of which creates prime sponsorship and advertising real estate.
No value was given for the sponsorship or the revenue that can be generated from NFT creation.
“This multi-year agreement confirms the strength of our brand worldwide and through this unique partnership with Crypto.com we will write a new page of innovation, bringing our fans closer to the game through technology. Over the next few months we will be developing a number of commercial and marketing initiatives to expand our fan base and engage more and more fans,” said di Servio.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
