Bubbles stir the emotions, and even those who have profited by selling may feel confused. This Vancouverite, who has $600K equity in hand after selling her house in 2008, expresses regret, sheepishness, dismay, fear, greed, depression and resentment – all in one paragraph. This anecdote is also noteworthy in that it shows that supply does indeed come into the market as prices drop and owners begin to sell out of fear. How many Vancouver properties will enter the market when prices next descend? -vreaa
“I ended up making a huge mistake and frankly, feel like a pretty great fool. We bought a home in Vancouver’s hideous inflated west side in 2005. We had a $375,000 mortgage on a nice home we had reno’d. I thought the mortgage was huge (in hindsight I see it wasn’t!). When the markets starting tanking in October 2008 we stupidly panicked, put the house up for sale and essentially gave it away for about $1,000,000, and then rented a home for a hideous monthly fee and intended to buy again when values “stabilized”. Well to our dismay, the average house price one year later in the same area is $1,400,000. Needless to say we have been unceremoniously turfed out of the Vancouver housing market due to our unfounded fear about a housing crash that never happened. I am not challenging you [Garth Turner], I know in time this market cannot sustain itself, but in the meantime we have to live somewhere in Vancouver and with a 70% increase in house value in 10 years, and a steady stream of strong Asian cashflows, it seems a correction will never come. I don’t want to lose out on equity, and our lease is up, and what the heck do we do next? We are in our mid-forties, our combined income is about $150,000 p.a., and we have about $600,000 to put down. Luckily no debt otherwise. The thought of going to a cramped condo after living in a nice home is depressing, not to mention the resentment over the mountain of equity we lost.”
