Values are, we believe, based on July 2010 estimates.
Most Recent Comments:
- forex conquest review on Gord Goble in Local Newspapers – Vancouver RE ‘House Of Cards’ Will “Implode”
- rod_jonsson on Chat Thread
- Nemesis on Chat Thread
- Leona on MSM Continue To Pump RE – “What’s next? “Cigarettes found to extend lifetime: Marlboro?”
- rod_jonsson on Chat Thread
- Nemesis on Chat Thread
- rp1 on Chat Thread
- Farmer on Chat Thread
- Nemesis on Chat Thread
- Nemesis on Chat Thread
- Nemesis on Chat Thread
- rod_jonsson on Chat Thread
Type of Anecdote
- 01. He Said, She Said (247)
- 02. Profiting from the Boom (441)
- 03. Changed my Life (103)
- 04. Changed my Career (38)
- 05. Where do Buyers get the money? (958)
- 06. Held my Nose and Leapt (96)
- 07. Avoiding Vancouver (375)
- 08. Overextended Buyers (1182)
- 09. Delaying Buying (315)
- 10. Demoralized Renters? (362)
- 11. Regrets about Investing in RE (417)
- 12. Effects of Development (274)
- 13. 2010 Olympics Related (74)
- 14. Social Effects of the Boom (1255)
- 15. Misallocation of Resources (958)
- 16. Missed The Boat? (236)
- 17. The Froogle Scott Chronicles (27)
- 18. Spot The Speculator (171)
- 19. BlastRadiusPostCards (17)
- 20. The Limitless Demand Argument For Ongoing Market Strength (70)
- 21. Vancouver RE-Verse [Found Poems] (8)
- 22. RE References In Popular Culture (41)
- 23. Jumping The Shark (1)
- 24. Policies On Housing (10)
- 25. Epigrams For The Bubble (1)
- 26. Premature Calls Of "Bottom" (3)
- 27. Seller Panic (3)
- 28. Erroneous Causation Theories For Falling Prices (7)
- 29. Bubblespeak (1)
- Uncategorized (176)
Blogroll
- 01 Vancouver Condo Info
- 02 AmericaCanada [retired, no archive]
- 03 Housing Analysis
- 04 RealEstateTalks BC
- 05 Vancouver RE and then some
- 06 Whispers from the Village on the Edge of the Rainforest
- 07 Greater Fool
- 08 Canada Bubble
- 09 Rob Chipman's blog
- 10 YatterMatters
- 11 condohype [retired; archives available]
- 12 vancouver (un)real estate
- 13 Agent Will's Stats [retired]
- 14 Landlord Rescue
- 15 The Economic Analyst
- 16 Canadian Housing Price Charts
- 17 Hoodsurf [retired Jun 2011]
- 18 World Housing Bubble
- 19 Vancouver Price Drop
- 20 North American Economics
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Latest Anecdotes:
- Chat Thread
- Taking A Break
- “My best guess: this property is now an ‘investment hold’ and will be built ‘when prices recover’. Good luck on that!”
- Man Loses $745,000 Vancouver Condo Deposit
- Graphic – Degrees of Housing Overvaluation in Canada
- 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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- Chat Thread wp.me/pcq1o-5vD 3 weeks ago
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And the BC government just raised the threshold for the homeowners grant to $1.285.
http://www.bcassessment.ca/Documents/Homeowners-grant-changes.pdf
Yeah.
We heard discussion of this on CBC news yesterday. They cited retirees with low income living in ‘multi-million dollar’ homes who couldn’t afford the property taxes. The grant amounts to $570 per annum.
$570/property X 2 million properties in BC = $1.14 billion tax subsidy?
Yes, god forbid they are inconvenienced by market forces while families struggle with basement suites or 90 minute commutes.
It sounds cold, but I agree with rp1 – being retired is not an argument for special treatment when you have $1M+ in assets.
“Retirees with low income living in “multi-million dollar homes” in BC can defer their property taxes; so can persons with disabilities, so the Homeowners’ grant isn’t of much help to them. The people this really helps are the homeowners of condos or single family houses on 33′ lots, since most larger lots (west of Ontario) are assessed at more than the threshold of $1,285 Million.
Thanks for the laff, VREAA.
A ‘laff’, it is. Watch for this to ‘swing to blue’ in coming years.
Like watching the US elections.
Dude, if it swung from blue to red to black to festering boil crimson, I still wouldn’t buy. What exactly *is* the color of a 50% slice and dice, anyway?
Ox-blood.
Can’t believe how cleanly the red vs blue is delineated by whether an address has W or E, right down Ontario St. That has to be an artifact of the assessment algo.
Excellent point.
But, also could be a result of a mental ‘algo’ in the minds of buyers and sellers!
Should also consider that this map would be a better representation if the units were $/sq ft.
Some homes in southwest Vancouver are just huge.
Durr -> that’s also a good point. Also, lot size.
Wouldn’t it be great to have access to ‘the matrix’? (the data matrix, that is… the uber-spreadsheet.. It’s out there somewhere, just not freely available.)
Personally, we have fantasies about a Canadian Zillow, so we can review any for-sale properties sales history at will. Perhaps not in time for this burst; pity.
The MLX database. If someone just took out a license, and paid the token fee you could definitely do a couple CSV pulls.
is there a .torrent for the MLS database?
Amazing. I would love to see it in a sliding scale (say 100K at a time) but it still boggles the mind how well the red and blue are split right now.
Where to find true facts not distorted by bias? Front cover of Vancouver Metro dated Jan 4, 2012, headline: “Homes not getting any cheaper” says SFH in West Sine increased to 1,645,000 from $1,189,000 last year. East Side rose to $1,031,000 from $816,000 and 2bdrm apartments downtown to $610,000 from $542,000.
An article worth reading!
“No aspect of data supports bullish view of house market”
(…) The arithmetic is simple, and some of the warning signals look uncomfortably like those of the days before the market implosion that brought the 1980s to a thumping, crashing close.
(…) Taken together, the implication is that a significant portion of the run-up in Canadian housing prices has been driven by credit availability, and that the pattern has increased household vulnerability to financial shocks.
(…)So: housing prices have for many years been rising faster than Canadians’ incomes, and those households’ abilities to take on new debt to afford that housing will eventually be tapped out. Meanwhile, the pace of investment in new housing construction has been persistently and uncomfortably high, and the dark spectre of forests of less-than-full condo towers begins to loom.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/01/03/bear-snarls-at-housing/
I forgot to add this paragraph!
“This view is consistent with three market outlooks, the first being that house price appreciation will thoroughly stall out; this is the brightest view. Next is the likelihood of what housing market forecasters might call a market correction, a price drop of 5% to 10%. The third possibility, which becomes more likely in the event of a significant hit to labour markets, is a bursting bubble, a bigger average price drop, and a lot more households financially underwater.”
It’s that time of year folks:
http://evaluebc.bcassessment.ca/
For those of you without access to MLS, look up assessments and 2011 sale prices for your models.
Interesting…I checked the MLS today in North Delta’s Sunshine Hills, where we sold our home in favor of renting in Oct of 2010. Dang. So many houses for sale nowadays. I had realtors calling me on a monthly basis throughout 2010, begging for a home to stick on the market. Now, looking at all the product out there, I seriously doubt I could get what I got for it a year ago.
Hope the new owners are having fun. Not only did they buy the house on the third day it was listed – at full price – but they did so with money from the bank *and* money from a wealthy relative. They never could have swung it otherwise.
In the meantime, my condo-ensconced friends in New West, broke all the time due to mortgage payments and a $450/month maintenance fee, will point out the front page of today’s Sun and say “You were wrong.” While at the same time gearing up for even higher property taxes I suspect.
Oh the humanity.
PILOTHOUSE is the NewsLeader’s New Westminster 2011 NEWSMAKER OF THE YEAR
Pilothouse real estate marketing has helped sell projects around the world. But it’s selling their own community that really ignites their passions.
And that’s what has made the NewsLeader select them as the 2011 New Westminster Newsmaker of the Year.
Slow year in New West if a developer wins “newsmaker” of the year.
Some nice “free marketing” for them though
Via granite countertop over at VCI
http://www.newwestnewsleader.com/news/136159853.html
You would think that receiving the rand of 2nd most dangerous city in the lower mainland would be a bigger newsmaker of the year for new west eh? While I guess they are only 15th in the Country…
Oi. The place we’re renting has seen a 20% assessment increase. Older home on a nice lot.
I’m a bit nervous that this will end in our eviction for the sale of the place. This is what I hate most about this crazy RE situation.
Got our assessment yesterday, and it’s down $30K from last year. Fine by me, lowers my property taxes!
Are you sure this is from 2011 prices or from the 2011 assessment, which is from July 2010?
http://www.btaworks.com/2011/12/10/main-street-the-city-of-vancouvers-million-dollar-line/
Not sure, jesse; good point.
If BTA put this together and posted it by 10 Dec 2012, perhaps it represented July-2010 figures (or did they get Jul-2011 data before wide release in Jan-2012?). Don’t know.
According to the link the 2011 assessment data were used, which means July 2010. Likely that delineating 1MM line will be less clear this time around. Maybe it’s a $1.2MM line now?
Thanks, jesse, post corrected.