Vancouver Condo Info

6 Responses to “repairs: 2292 w. 7th Ave.”

1. 1
   M- Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
   My wife and I looked at a large townhouse unit in this building a couple years ago– it was priced very well, given the market. Well, we didn’t actually get in it. We walked up to the building, it looked like a classic leaker. Stucco sides (not that stucco is necessarily bad), no/minimal roof overhangs, architectural features that stick out from the side, some elements of poor design… It just looked wrong.

   And then somebody came out of a unit in the building (not the one for sale). So I asked her what she thought of the building and the neighbourhood. She liked the place.

   I asked if it had any water problems. “Oh no, there’s no water. Just some moisture ingress, it’s not a leaky condo. The strata has come up with a repair plan with an engineering company, and the building’ll look really nice once it’s done. All they have to do is secure a contractor.”

   So I asked how much the per-unit special assessment was expected to be. “$100,000-150,000. But the building will look really nice once it’s done.”

   My jaw hit the sidewalk. The unit we were looking at was ~1.5x the size of her unit. Ouch.

2. 2
   Digi Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
   Thanks for that M- these personal experiences are really great to hear. Does ‘priced very well’ mean that it took into account the assesment cost? I’m suprised the woman you talked to was so calm about the repairs, it seems like people in vancouver are just resigned to the fact that so many of our condos leak.
3. 3
   scullboy Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
   I really think Vancouver is closed off from the rest of Canada. That’s the only thing that explains the attitudes about property here.

   People just don’t understand that in the rest of the country:

   1) You can buy a HOUSE, and a large one, for what people pay for a 500 SF condo.

   2) Other parts of the country have bad weather spells. Builders take that into account. In BC they just do plain old shoddy work.

4. 4
   blueskies Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
   1) You can buy a HOUSE, and a large one, for what people pay for a 500 SF condo.

   almost any place in Canada with the exceptions of Vancouver, Victoria and possibly Ft McMurray you can get a nice spacious place to live for less than $250K.

   Builders take that into account. In BC they just do plain old shoddy work.

   yet people still rush in to buy w/o thinking…down right scary!

5. 5
   M- Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
   Digi: it was maybe $50-100K below market value. …But with a $100-150K assessment, with the risk of more problems being found, it represented a high risk. Also, with that extent of work, it wouldn’t be liveable for much of the repair time.
6. 6
   patriotz Says:
   February 14th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
   it was maybe $50-100K below market value.

   No it wasn’t. Anything priced below market value will sell instantly.

   It was priced below the market value of properties without leakage problems, which is something entirely different.