buffates at vancouvercondo.info 21 Sep 2010 10:24am – “A while ago [4 May 2010] I posted about my wife’s friend who confessed that she was crying every night about their home budget and how the house was killing them. Well, apparently she found some company. There are now three housewives commiserating about how they don’t know how much longer they can hold on. This is the case and two of those families have a tenant! Roof, furnace, plumbing, tenant vacancy. Any of these very common issues would bury these people. Did I mention they already have a line of credit and credit cards maxed out?”
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- “My best guess: this property is now an ‘investment hold’ and will be built ‘when prices recover’. Good luck on that!”
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- The Rare Individual With A Negative Ownership Premium
- Advice Regarding Renting In Vancouver, Please – “Unfortunately, the Vancouver rental stock is absolutely atrocious. It just seems like every landlord is looking for someone to pay 100% of their mortgage on a crappy place through rental income.”
- “I just visited Manhattan for a week, and happened to snap some real estate ads on both the Upper West and Upper East sides of the island. Compare to Vancouver. It simply doesn’t compute.”
- Ben Rabidoux In Vancouver Next Week
- “The mortgage company told me they were calling in my 40-year, 0-down mortgage. I have paid nearly sixty thousand dollars towards it, but, nearly five years in, I have yet to touch the principal.”
- ‘Vancouver City Hall: Housing Report Card 2012′; Plus Revised Version
- “My folks find themselves at 65 still owing half the value of their home and recreation property to the bank. After almost 30 years of ownership in the BPOE and a number of boom markets, they have very little to show for it.”
- “Rent for $2,200 a month or buy and have a mortgage of $4,310 per month. Why would anyone buy?”
- “They were talking about two couples they knew who had recently bought a lot and planned to each build a house on it and live as neighbours.”
- Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association Annual First-Time Buyer Seminar Attendance Plummets
- Mom and Pop Get It Wrong In All Markets, Time And Again
- The average British Columbian homeowner is not going to pay off their mortgage by the time they retire.
- “He’s sold all his properties except his current one, which is now for sale. He explained that the market’s currently in crash mode, worst that he’s ever seen.”
- “One of my old high school buddies finally got her mother to sell the family home in Kitsilano – sold for over $1M, monies realized after debt paid off $185K.”
- “I know someone who just declared bankruptcy because her condo was assessed at $150k and she bought it presale north of $250k in 2005 or 2006.”
- Sturdy, With Views – “Calling Froogle Scott!… Is Dr. Scott ‘In The House’?” [Not In This One, Certainly]
- “She said the market was dead in Victoria and that it would remain so for a very long time. I asked how she knew. Her answer was fascinating and should scare the pants off the real estate crowd.”
- Kits Notes – “I’m pretty sure that this is the first 3+ bedroom property of any type that I’ve seen in the 5 years I’ve lived here that is priced below $700K.”
- “A beautiful Belfast home, in the equivalent of 1st Shaughnessy, bought at their RE peak in 2007 for £3.5 million, has now sold for £800K, almost 80%-off. The market didn’t suffer any significant economic shocks. Rates & unemployment didn’t skyrocket. They didn’t build more land. Sentiment just changed and the prices fell and fell.”
- “Two family members of hers are trapped, underwater, in condos on the East Side.”
- “Interprovincial migration is not saying good things about BC’s economy.”
- Vancouver RE: Not As Expensive Provided You Don’t Think – “It’s clear that our perception of affordability has been coloured by living on a continent where housing is unusually inexpensive.”
- More Undisclosed RE Industry Insiders Publicized As Clients – “In 1995, Allan and Karin Hoegg were mortgage-free. But no more. Today their Vancouver home is a valuable source of income as they plan for full retirement.”
- Rumor that some OV units will be reduced by 20%.
- Downside Weights On The Vancouver RE Market – “One of the older guys (over 60) mention to the guy beside him that he and his wife were thinking about selling their family home, and renting, in order to get some of the money that was locked up in the house.”
- “My buddy was looking to upgrade to a house in the Coquitlam area. With 200k extra for a home, that’s half of lifetime saving between him and his wife.”
- “I was walking in the Fraser neighborhood yesterday, I noticed that the population, on average, seem to be composed of workers. I belong to the top 5 percent in terms of income. Nevertheless, I cannot afford any of the houses for sale in that neighbourhood.”
- “Vancouver is an urban resort whose value mostly resides in its real estate and not much else.”
- “Rogers Communications is expanding into RE; aiming to relaunch website; providing critical data that can help potential buyers assess the value of a property from the comfort of their home computer.”
- I’m only 50 and I can just about retire if I want to, all because of a single simple decision – “When prices rebounded to their former highs, then rocketed another 30% higher to what I considered to be totally unsustainable levels, I decided that only a fool would pass up a second opportunity to harvest such a massive non-taxable capital gain, and in 2011 I sold my place.”
- The Vacant Lot of Versailles, Richmond.
- “I don’t think that most people think things are going to crash, just that there is going to be a slight correction, but it was amazing to me how sentiment has changed, and the fact Vancouver RE is too high was just understood.”
- “The ‘investor’ who purchased our house put it up for sale two months later, in January 1981, but the bubble had burst.”
- For A City To Have That Kind Of Vacancy, It’s Like Cancer – “Downtown, the vacant unit rate is so high that it’s as though there were 35 towers at 20 storeys apiece – all empty.”
- “What’s the worst that can happen? You can’t pay your mortgage, so sell your house! No fear.”
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I think that the housing bubble is a result of a personal having bubble that we all live in including me. We all now seem to live in a bubble about how the world should be and everything in our lives is about what we have rather than who we are. I hope that when the bubble fully bursts we will all focus on who we are rather than what we have.
I admire your optimism about the bubble bursting leading to moe “reality”.
I fear though this will go differently. Most people don’t take too nicely to being suddenly force to realize that they aren’t as well off as they think they are or that their way of life is not sustainable.
I fear most people will be taking this rather harsh and how they, and society as a whole will react remains to be seen, but I don’t think it will be pretty, the whole “anti-immigration” and “anti-refugee” attitude that has started surfacing recently is a warning sign, IMO.
There are bubbles, and then there are bubbles. @ams, your response reminds me of the visualization of the world’s distribution of wealth. People making $60k per year are in the top .01% of the world’s population or something like that. If we distributed all of the money in the world evenly, we’d all have to live off of $1000 per year. I’m just making the numbers up, so hopefully you get the gist.
It’d be ironic if someone in Uganda was thinking amongst their group that ‘eventually things will come to pass – can’t wait for the world’s bubble to pop!’
I’m frequently surprised that the folks on other websites don’t realize that our political system exists to keep the bubble intact. Yes, there is a bubble – you’re already in it! The housing “bubble” is actually froth.
I grew up in a war torn country and came to Canada when I was 14 with my parents we had no money and no resources (we sold everything we owned to buy plane tickets to Canada). 20 years later we doing very well! I am always thankful for this great country that I call my own and my home.
What totally blows me away is even though I am in the top 0.01% of the world there are so many more people who are much richer than you and I.
I just saw a CNN article stating that the wealth of the top 400 richest Americans is 1.7 trillion dollars in a society with GDP of 14.5 trillion that represents 11.7% of USA GDP. I saw a figure the day showing the USA Federal government collects about 13% of GDP as taxes!
I have a hard time thinking about how my reality or sense of normal for a person changes as they have more and more money. I guess in the final analysis everything is relative.
maybe those housewives need to find real jobs.
I sense a new reality TV show in the making.
Those hormones get them into all sorts of fixes.
On one hand the anecdote doesnt surprise me. Its what happens. For a decade you didnt have to work for something, you just had to borrow.
Now the days are returning when income is the key and lower debts is essential. They call it higher net worth.