Note seen next to a “sold” sign in West Point Grey…
“I have noticed many people stopping to look at the “sold” sign and I feel an explanation is due.
I have lived here for 60 years and found it a wonderful area to grow up in.
We knew every person in the hood and to this day I still have many friends that I grew up with in this area.
Unfortunately, time marches on, and these huge houses have replaced the bungalows that once dominated the block.
I don’t know one person that lives in them, and I’m not sure if I have ever actually seen anyone in them.
To me that is not a neighbourhood.
It is not their fault as I have said times have changed.
It is now time for me to move to a small town on the west side of Vancouver Island.
I hope to regain the warmth and friendship that I once had here.
Here’s hoping.
Bob”
[The above images and transcription posted at vancouvercondo.info by 'No Money Down' in early April 2011. Thanks to Nick for bringing the post to our attention.]
Ahh… isn’t foreign investment great? Best place on earth. Thank you Canada.
On the other hand, we’d imagine that Bob is getting a very sweet nest-egg for his retirement.
He is one of the small minority who will have ‘cashed out’ before this all implodes. He’s done it because of circumstance (retirement, we’d imagine), so he will turn out to be fortunate. Very few sell near the top by design.
Not to mention he probably inherited this house. So it’s essentially “free money” for him. Even if he would have sold at the bottom he’d probably still made some coin on it.
The bears have been saying that for YEARS. During the course of the past 8 years, whenever somone sells, several bears would note ‘He’s selling at the top. good for him!’ And we all know that it kept going up.
Homeowner -> Yeah, bears HAVE been wrong for years. What’s your point? Now is now.
See:
“As frustrating as it may be” on the Wrong Side of the Bubble, the Bearish Position Remains Right – VREAA, 25 Jan 2011
Very true. Wish I could be so lucky.
great post – sort of
good for him for getting out now
But Bob, by all indications, isn’t moving for the money. He’s moving because he no longer feels part of the community. The fact his house may be worth millions wouldn’t have meant much if his neighbours came over for tea once and a while.
It isn’t always about the money.
Possibly. But it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that Bob is using at least a bit of post hoc justification. “Besides, the neighbourhood isn’t what it used to be”.
At the same time I agree with you re money ≠ everything. And if the neighbourhood was still warm and neighbourly, perhaps Bob wouldn’t have even thought of moving.
hear hear Jesse.
Good luck Bob. Sorry your neighborhood turned into such a suckhole.
jesus h christ that is sad.
Vreaa,
I you are saying that this is the top, you might be wrong.
All signs point to a hot market going forward. I know it sounds crazy, but from the place where I am (White Rock) detached properties are selling fast and there is no much choice.
I see houses that have been on the market for months only to be taken off and relisted 200 to 300k higher and sold.
I know it sounds as a tired argument but most houses I attend are crowded with people of chinese descent and this is a fact.
There seems to be a huge flow of foreign money coming here which statistics probably do not capture due to the nature of the transactions.
And believe it or not, White Rock is starting to look like Richmond everyday more now, the pace of change has been furious in the past 3 years.
On the other hand, I cruise by the restaurants and shops on marine drive here every evening and they are almost all empty. Open but nobody inside. Even on Friday they aren’t 50% full. Strange times indeed.
paradox -> No, we are not saying this is definitely a top. We know that nobody can accurately time a top (that is one very reliable bubble characteristic!). What we are saying is that the Vancouver market is definitely a massive speculative bubble, that will certainly implode at some point.
And, as is common during these frenzies, some weird things are happening in the markets. Look at the inconsistencies that you note. As you say, strange times.
Watch condo yields. That is a pure indication of the market’s relative strength or weakness. Remember Vancouver is home to 2MM+ people. They need to live somewhere! Don’t be fooled by marginal capital flows; the magnitude required to keep prices high is significant, close to equal to the province’s health care budget.
Its funny that since we left and two other couples that we were really good friends with in Vancouver have also left around the same time. We all tried so hard to make things work, two incomes, NO kids and still No home ownership. Now, what ticks me off the most is that both my grandfathers came to this city in the dirty 30s from NOTHING and worked hard to raise families, fight World Wars and make B.C. the AMAZING province that it WAS years ago. Suddenly all the foreigners walk into the front doors with LOTS of money from Asia, who knows if it is clean or dirty money, I don’t know and start buying up and taking over everything. I don’t understand why the Asian culture was just ALLOWED to walk through the front doors and start taking over Vancouver neighbourhoods that were originally built by European settlers and knocked down to build these MASSIVE homes that don’t even fit properly onto the properties that were meant for, much smaller homes. Now for many European Canadians the opportunity to ever own your own home and property is now gone FOREVER due to the OUTRAGEOUS real estate prices. The only chance that my husband and I would have had in ever owning a home in this city would have been to do Ilegal drug activity and I’m PROUD to say, NO WAY. I’m true to my ancestors that if I cannot earn my way in life the OLD fashioned way by hard work and paying my DUES then I DON’T want it.
I’m sorry, but this smacks of racism and xenophobia. I understand the frustration, but still, pull yourself together.
First, you seem to be overlooking the contributions of Chinese immigrants to building the BC that greeted your grandfathers when they arrived. BC was actually built by a lot of Chinese immigrants – who do you think, for example, built the section of the railroad that was critical to linking BC to the rest of the Canada? Oh, that’s right. Chinese immigrants.
Please go and inform yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_immigration_to_Canada
Second, the inflation of real estate wasn’t caused by the Chinese immigrants. They’re just an easy and visible scapegoat. If you want to blame someone, blame the people in government who removed the ceiling on the amount the CMHC would back, risk-free, for a bank to give people a mortgage. Canadians have learned nothing from the American housing collapse (I watched it from the sidelines while I lived there in California).
Third, never underestimate the sheer scale of activity in China. Is there dirty money? Sure. But are there also companies producing a metric frackload of goods for Western markets that are happy to vastly overpay for goods versus the artificially deflated costs of Chinese labour.
It sucks being on the wrong side of arbitrage – but if you’d like to be on the other side of the equation, you either have to move away to make more money (as you have done, because you realized you can’t do it here) before you can move back, or move someplace else that has a lower cost of living. Welcome to a global economy – as General Shinseki said: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”