“Sold my house on Vancouver’s West Side in February this year. Cashed in on the Chinese New Year buying spree. Got 200k over asking, I still can’t quite believe it. Have been renting in the same area since then. Realtor friend said market has slowed completely in this area (Kitsilano). There are a few houses that sell, but the offers over asking are gone. Now most of the updates I get via email are “price reductions”. Another West Side realtor I know expects the area to drop 20% in 2012. Some of my friends are dismissing this as the seasonal “Christmas slowdown”. They think I’m nuts and real estate will come roaring back. I haven’t seen prices slide dramatically just yet but expect the reality check will really hit in February when the listings start popping up again.”
- West Side Survivor at greaterfool.ca 20 Nov 2011 7:58pm
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- 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.”
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- “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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All the signs seem to support that currently. Van-West has had large listing increases compared to last year. Also – sales are really down. This month we will see 30% over last year same month. This year has been a tale of two-halves. First half was very hot – and second half was very cool. It’s at the tipping point now and with slowing sales and rising listing pace, we will see all the froth come off next year. Low interest rates may continue to “suck” more people to buy. However – one other thing that will start to become a trend is the fact that most condo buyers in the past 3 years are now only flat on their purchase price. This, combined with poor wage gains and somewhat high unemployment will slow the sales for the move-up buyer.
This will unravel fairly quickly once boomers want to sell and there are no buyers. 20% is not a bad estimate but don’t be surprised if we see only a 10% reduction as prices are sticky on the way down.
Everything you say makes sense.
Once we see flat prices or downside momentum, we can’t see a bounce coming in early; we don’t see sudden massive stimulus coming to the rescue a la 2008. But the exact path to the trough is, of course, impossible to predict. 10%, 20% or even more could come off in 2012.
Yes agree, but housing busts will seem glacial: the US one is into its fifth year and still ongoing. I hope vreaa will write his/her thoughts on the concept of “speculation” — it’s not black or white. In the US many of those who entered the market without thinking they were speculators turned out to have a bit more “speculator” than they thought. I expect no different in Canada in the coming decade.
I am preparing a piece on ‘speculation’ – you have a pretty good idea what I mean by the term regarding the Vanc RE market, but it’d be nice to try to state it definitively. Will do.
“In our polling, Occupy Vancouver never even showed up on the list of top 15 unprompted issues for voters. Nor, by the way, did chickens. Separated bike lanes were there, but the number of people who were pro bike lanes was always significantly higher than those opposed. The actual top issues were affordability, homelessness, and transit.”
Bob Penner, Vision Pollster
http://bobpenner.com/2011/11/23/pre-occupied-how-the-media-and-the-npa-got-it-wrong-in-the-vancouver-election/
This is a big problem. The majority of the population thinks affordability is the main problem, and their reaction is to vote Vision, not to discover which candidates actually have anything intelligent to say about affordability (i.e., Garossino).
Very helpful info and points, Jeff.
If one looks at the map of voter participation (see Frances Bula’s blog, sorry I don’t have the link), one will see that the highest rates of voter participation in the city, other than a few isolated neighbourhoods here and there, were on the West Side. Of course, those rates topped out at only around 40%, so I don’t know what if anything that proves. Does anyone know anything about elections? Does this statistic suggest that VIsion’s backers are overwhelmingly wealthy?
A very interesting interactive map and data from the election is available here.
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col3%3E%3E1+from+2234350+&h=false&lat=49.24629475701811&lng=-123.12418350000002&z=11&t=1&l=col3%3E%3E1
Nonymouse -> Thanks, also previously posted by jesse.
Where is the key to the map? (One gets a breakdown of the vote by clicking on each Voting Division, but what do the colours of those divisions in the main map indicate?)
The key seems to be missing (paging Tufte).
The colours seem to represent voter turnout.
Dark blue = >40%
Light Blue = 35-40%
Green = 30-35%
Yellow = 25-30%
Orange = <25%
Thanks.
Looks like percentage voter turnout would probably be highly correlated with annual income.
Big house and lot in Dunbar = $3.7mm
Big house and lot in Surrey/Langley/… = $0.7mm
Cost of daily helicopter commute = $500
Days of work per year = 250 days
Number of years of daily helicopter commute you can afford by selling in Dunbar to buy in the suburbs = 24 years
[hahaha -ed.
Another example of the kind of arbitrage we'd expect to see effecting Vancouver prices.]