4549 W 12th Ave, Vancouver; V945137
2569sqft SFH on a 33×122 lot; built 1933
Asking price: $1,975,000
And now, without horizontal distortion!:
Seriously, I know you think your eyes must be playing tricks on you, but that second photo is the actual house:
In Vancouver, one has to learn to get by with less cat-swinging room for your 2 million bucks.
—
By the way, to the best of our knowledge, this house was last sold in 2008, the ask price then was $1,495,000.
Anybody have access to the sales price from 2008?
Same realtor.
“Rarely available”? We think not.
More like “Traded every 4 years”.
Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive 
Prices are still stable. The doomers here are still dreaming in lala land. Blaming the media for pumping and lying. Once a renter, always a renter. Van had never been cheaper to own vs rent. Renting means you’re someone’s bitch and you can get the boot just like that. How fun
Thanks for your succinct distillation of the entire bull argument.
“Stable” is the new “going up”.
jesse likes this
poco,
Nothing wrong with renting – I rented for many years.
The problem here is that the posting renters think the buyer is doing it wrong…even after hundreds of thousands of equity gained.
There is no absolute right or wrong here – only right for me or wrong for me. Make your decision based on your needs, circumstance, and capability.
For me buying made sense and I saw a good opportunity. I took the risk I deserve the reward.
” I took the risk I deserve the reward.”
You took the risk and receive the reward. There is no morality or beauté in it.
Jesse,
when it comes to morality I let my maker decide if I’ve lived a just and honest life. Thanks for your opinion though
ok, but when the “reward” backfires on you – which it might/will, who do you think you will take down with you? taxpayers, all of us, we’ll all pay for your good “sense”. we’ll see who the whiners are then.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/04/24/is-canadas-housing-bubble-bound-to-burst/
“I let my maker decide if I’ve lived a just and honest life”
We’re talking about speculating (i.e. investing with anticipation it goes up in value) on land prices. There is nothing Godly about it, it’s about money. If this were about a place to live for a family the reward is there even if prices are halved.
It’s the management of risk that leads to rewards, not risk itself (which is generally something smart people want to reduce, unless in a thrill seeking mood)
I so agree F1. There is nothing wrong with renting and I too did it for awhile. What I find annoying is that the bears are so determined that there will be at least a 50% correction and that prices will return to a level where the average family income will be able to buy a sfh in the city of Vancouver. I do not see this happening ever. yes there will be ups and downs but not in the neighborhood of 50%. This fear mongering may keep people off the property ladder and they will probably look back at regret it. This same thing was going on when Vancouver Housing Blogger was online and he was proven wrong. I don’t think that you can say that a 10 year escalation in price is a bubble. It is now a world economy and many people from all over are putting their cash into Vancouver real estate which is pushing up prices. Just walk around downtown and listen, English is not the norm any more. I say this is a good thing.
rusty, [impolite phrase]!
And the whiners insist there are no starter homes to be had in Vancouver.
(All I got is snark this week.)
encourage me no further, i beg u. blame nem for planting the seed in too fertile soil.
You can still call something totally renovated when it was done in 98?
Yes when you consider it was built in the Great Depression.
If anyone has info on a character home at 4122 Carnarvon, I’d be interested — it’s been vacant for at least a year I believe, was on Craigslist as a rental, is now listed for sale at IIRC 2.78 million by Victor Kwan.
It may be another place that was bought and flipped by a realtor. I hope someone reading this blog will investigate this practice, which I think is widespread and has been especially in the last few years. I know of another similar place sold in May where 2 of the 6 bidders were local realtors.
3738 West 2nd. was bought and flipped by a realtor. That used to be unethical.
—-4549—
Active $ 1975000 20-Apr-12
Sold $ 1430000 09-Jul-08
Active $ 1495000 09-Jun-08
Terminated $ 1679000 09-May-08
Active $ 1595000 09-May-08
Active $ 1679000 03-Apr-08
Sold $ 457500 11-Mar-97
—–4122 Carnarvon—–
that is actually the incorrect address, it is actually 4212.
Owner is X, Zhu.
Sold in Mar. 11 for 2.49. active at 2.58, 2.85, 2.57, 2.85 and now back to 2.798.. Same realtor for all price changes
Dland, thanks, sorry I had mistyped address for 4212.
hey vreaa,
this post made me laugh. I don’t know why I think they realtor “wide angle lens” shot is so funne, but it is.
“one has to learn to get by with less cat-swinging room”
Let’s not get carried away
The house is on standard lot and nearly 2600sqft.
Yes, it’s bloody expensive but that’s another issue
A 2600 sq ft 2 story (including the basement and the front and back porches and the garage in the footage no doubt). That’s a post-war bungalow on a skinny lot at a minimum of the fifth the price anywhere else. Keep buying suckers.
“post-war”
Um… which war?
Thanks this post really made me laugh. The price, the wide angle shot, the “rarely available” selling point. I would like to remind people, that just like men, houses for sale are like buses, one leaves and another comes along 5 minutes later. This is the emotional side of buying a home.
I can’t get excited about ANY home on the West side anymore at current prices. I wouldn’t buy at these prices even if I was guaranteed they would just go up at the level of inflation. (For the record I think we are going to have 50% + correction in Vancouver.)
And what gets me even more is that it’s not simply the West side. The ENTIRE lower mainland is so over-priced it’s beyond ridiculous now and obviously unsustainable. I’d believe the “it’s different here argument” if it were more contained just to the West side, or select areas, but it is not. Even a shack on the East side, Burnaby or North Van costs a million. What are people thinking????? Do people reallly think this can last??
“Even a shack on the East side, Burnaby or North Van costs a million. What are people thinking????? Do people reallly think this can last??”
LS,
So long as we keep adding people without more land, yes, it will continue.
If you have a 12oz cup of coffee and keep pouring eventually it will overflow. You need to stop adding coffee or use a 16oz cup, right?
Properties without land is an entirely different market. Suburbs with land are different markets.
Affordability is a larger constraint than lack of land. Thus, it can’t continue. It’s too expensive for most of the “1%” let alone the average Vancouverite. Even HAM has its limits.
The thing people seemingly forget is how long it actually takes to earn and SAVE $1 million, let alone $2 – $3 million. For a very few they might be able to do this in 10 – 20 years, for most, they won’t EVER achieve this, and for the rest an entire lifetime.
I read somewhere that a dentist sold his West side home and made more on the sale than he was able to save in an entire lifetime as a dentist. THAT certainly can’t last. A dentist would be in the “global 1%.”
“I read somewhere that a dentist sold his West side home and made more on the sale than he was able to save in an entire lifetime as a dentist”.
that’s true about most Canadian land owners who’ve owned their home for longer than 20 years – no matter what they did for a living or where they held their land. It’s not a comment on west side bubbly prices so much as it is the value of real estate over time.
“that’s true about most Canadian land owners who’ve owned their home for longer than 20 years – no matter what they did for a living or where they held their land. It’s not a comment on west side bubbly prices so much as it is the value of real estate over time.”
f1 – blatantly wrong for most jurisdictions outside BC. Everyone of my colleagues east of the rockies has earned many times more than the appreciation of their homes over the past 20 years. Give us a break. Only in Vancouver can you live off HELOCs. Think that tells you how sustainable Vancouver RE is.
When they’re constantly lied to and deceived and when real estate is made out to be more important than everything else combined, many of them do think it can last. I have several friends who still have complete and total blind faith in infinitely increasing real estate values. They go strangely quiet whenever I forward them a blog entry or a negative/realistic article, or whenever I open my mouth and blasphemy comes out. Granted, the tide is changing and I know other people who’ve now come around to my atheistic way of thinking. Still, for many, real estate in the BPOE is god.
“when real estate is made out to be more important than everything else combined”
Gordo,
You are making it important. It’s important to YOU. Just because you have these beliefs doesn’t make it true for everyone. Most people are happy renting or happy owning. Reading online renting blogger comments is not an effective way to gauge the mood of renters or owners.
Vreaa, remember the article I sent you by email a few days ago?
I “offered” on VCI and on Garth’s comment section to send this article to anyone interested.
To my biggest surprise, the vast majority of people that requested the article were, 1- realtors and 2-developers.
It seems to me that the insiders are actually very worried about the current state of the market and probably sense that the good days are over.
On a side note, Teranet issued its monthly price index this morning.
Vancouver is down -0.3% mom and up 6.2% yoy, the second worse performance in Canada, the worse being Victoria, down -1.1% mom and down -1.7% yoy. Enough to be worried indeed…
Forgot to paste the link to Teranet: http://www.housepriceindex.ca/admin.aspx?mode=voirHTML&nonews=201&qui=9734&langue=EN
Vancouver home prices are not down.
Teranet uses averages to determine level of activity – not an accurate reflection.
Nope. Teranet uses a ‘sales pair’ calculation to estimate value on properties that have been sold at least twice. Read here http://www.housepriceindex.ca/Default.aspx
The claim is that the City of Vancouver has increasing prices while other parts of Metro Vancouver are dropping, bringing down the index.
Could be. Last time the index substantially dropped no region was spared but one can never know for absolute certain the future.
Interesting, I wonder which municipalities are included in “Vancouver”
@4 I think it’s REBGV and FVREB areas combined: on the east Langley and Maple Ridge, White Rock to the south and Lion’s Bay to the north. The Teranet website has a map of the areas covered.
half-wits pay twice!
bank scan also retrieved this …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Cola