Vancouver Sun Headline – ‘Five more Metro Vancouver homeowners hosed in a falling market’

“A recent report from Central 1 Credit Union suggests a rebound in Metro Vancouver’s housing market is coming. However, at the moment there are property owners losing hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on their investments.”
There follow examples of homeowners losing money, care of @mortimer_1:
1. Burnaby. Bought $1.9M May 2016, Sold 2019 $1.495M, Loss $405K + expenses (over 21%)
2. Burnaby. Bought $3.11M 2016, Sold $2.1M 2019, Loss $1.01M + expenses (over 32.5%)
3. Vancouver Westside. Bought $2.7M Feb 2016, Sold $2M 2019, Loss $700K + expenses (over 25.9%)
4. North Vancouver. Bought $2.36M Mar 2017, Sold $2.05 2019, Loss $310K + expenses (over 13.1%)
– from David Carrigg, Vancouver Sun, 5 Dec 2019 (image: Anselm Kiefer)

Seeing terms like “homeowners hosed” and “falling market” in top-of-the-page Vancouver Sun headlines is certainly worthy of note – particularly for those of us who have been following this long enough to have endured years and years of local media entranced with rising prices. (Anybody remember the well-known local TV anchor exclaiming “I love Real Estate!” ?)
However, note that the Sun still talks about homes as “investments” – perhaps that will have to change before we’re done.
Here and elsewhere, some discussion of ‘soft landings’ that is clearly based more on hope than observation.
As noted previously, our target prices should be determined by utility value of properties, not on imagined future sale prices. Current prices are still far above those levels.
It ain’t over.
– vreaa