Vancouver Condo Info

I just received this email from a ‘concerned reader’:

Whats with the huge number of stoned construction workers in Vancouver? I walk by ‘the Vine’ on Broadway every morning around 9:00am and there’s usually a group of guys in hard hats smoking weed on Vine street. When they’re being more discreet they stay in the alley or in parked cars, but EVERY morning you can smell the smoke along tenth avenue, and this is far from the only case. Along 8th I’ve seen (and smelled) construction workers, renovators and landscapers smoking up in the morning, and friends that live downtown have told me that Nelson park often has construction workers taking ‘smoke breaks’.

I’m not opposed to anyones personal choice about leisure activities as long as it doesn’t affect me. I like to unwind with a beer after work and smoke occasionally, but I can’t imagine smoking up first thing in the morning and then trying to get work done. I don’t work in construction, but I’d think that being stoned around cranes, scaffolding and heavy equipment would be downright dangerous.

Never mind the theory that the dope trade contributes to irrational housing prices, whats it doing to construction quality?

It’s Friday August 10th and this is your open topic discussion for the weekend: Some stuff I’ve noticed this week:

- Markets tumble in Asia
- Wage pressures raise inflation fears
- A Widening Credit Squeeze?
- Bank of Canada moves to calm money markets
- Vancouver housing market still hot.

What do you see? Post your thoughts and links here.

From an article on MSNBC:

Major central banks swept in to calm credit markets spooked by mounting losses on Thursday and injected cash to prevent the financial system from seizing up.The European Central Bank pumped a record 94.8 billion euros ($130.6 billion) into Europe’s money markets as banks scrambled for cash after France’s biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, froze withdrawals from three funds. It cited U.S. subprime mortgage market problems.

This was the largest amount of money the ECB has ever injected into the markets in a single operation.

It routinely holds quick market operations when there is a cash imbalance but not since after the U.S. terror attacks in 2001 has the size neared Thursday’s level.

So much for subprime credit problems being contained to the US housing market.. Are we looking at a temporary psychological issue here, or are we looking at the start of credit market thats much tighter than the one we have today? And if credit is harder to come by and more expensive to get what does that mean for high priced real estate markets like Vancouver?

Sounds like a tourist got stuck staying near the downtown eastside.. From todays Star Phoenix:

Somewhat less beautiful is Vancouver. We stayed this time on the periphery of the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside, where the beggars and crackheads roam. Crack addicts are easy to distinguish from the other vagabonds. They’re constantly scanning the sidewalk around their feet, as if looking for cigarette butts. That’s what I thought at first they were doing. But no. What they’re really looking for is crumbs of crack that some careless addict might have dropped in the night. Any little bit of white detritus, they pick up, carefully examine and then discard. This is how they spend their days. I was reminded of the zombies in George Romero’s Living Dead films.

The entire review isn’t that bad – Despite its rotten core Vancouver is ranked by that visitor as among the greatest cities, and they really enjoyed Quadra Island.

WTF? We had great volume in July, lots of sales, but the benchmark house price didn’t go up at all. In fact at a benchmark price of $714,810 detached houses actually lost $905 in the month, hardly enough to get excited about, but shouldn’t prices be going up in a hot hot market?

Those at the lower end are still doing their part: Condos are up a healthy $4k from the previous month, while townhouses are up $5k, so what happened to the houses?

Ah! A long weekend and here’s the open topic discussion post for Friday August 3rd:

A few stories I’ve noticed this week:
-Strike could cost housing developers $30k per day.
-Has VANOC touched your soul? Inappropriately?
-Vancouver doing ‘heavy lifting‘ on homeless issue.
-Good new for US buyers: Mortgage rates drop .09%
-American Home Mortgage closing down.
-Canada’s appetite for real estate confounds experts.

What are you seeing out there? Post your news, links and anecdotes here!

There’s an article in the New York Times about adjustable rate mortgages and their impact on the US housing market:

House prices will need years to work off their irrational values, more people are going to lose their homes and Wall Street can probably look forward to some more nasty surprises.

In fact, the mortgage meltdown has arrived at something of a turning point. So far, most of the loans gone bad were among the worst of the worst. Some were based on outright fraud, either by the lender or the borrower. In many cases, buyers were never going to be able to make their monthly payments and were instead banking on a rapid appreciation in home values.

But the pool of people falling behind on their house payments is starting to widen beyond this initial group, and adjustable-rate mortgages are the main reason. Starting in the spring of 2005, these mortgages began to get a lot more popular, largely because regular mortgages no longer allowed many buyers to afford the house they wanted.

The drop in the US market so far has happened before the bulk of adjustable rate mortgages jump up to their new rate. According to credit suisse the peak mortgage reset will happen in October when more than $50 billion worth of ARMS will switch over to their new rate for the first time.