April Inventory Blooms
Spring is here and the listings are blooming like crazy. Both Vancouver and the Fraser Valley are being hit by a combination of fewer buyers and a greater number of owners looking to cash out. Here’s the REBGV listings chart for the last 4 years courtesy of Paul Boenisch:
Clicking the graph above will bring you to his blog which has additional graphs for sub areas- we’re seeing rapid inventory growth on the west side and north shore. Paul also tracks daily statistics on sales, price and listings on his website.
In the Fraser Valley listings are growing as well – They now have a near record amount of inventory. The following sales and listings chart for the FVREB was created by Mohican at Langley Financial Planning. Check out his site for more charts and detail on the Fraser Valley market.
It looks like growing inventory is starting to put some pressure on prices. Prices in all categories are up year over year, but the month over month figures look unusual for the spring selling season. The Benchmark price is down in all categories in North Vancouver, slightly up for houses and townhouses in Vancouver, but Vancouver condo’s and apartments saw their benchmark price drop by 3.16% in April. The spring market so far this year is looking markedly different from the last few years, we’ll see how this trend holds up into the summer.
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May 6th, 2008 at 9:19 am
patriotz, further to your point, anyone getting paid only on a completed sale cannot be working in the best interests of the buyer and often not the seller.
Other considerations can keep them honest to a degree but we all gotta eat sometime. It’s enough of a concern that buyers and sellers should know the deal.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:12 am
“Anyone getting a commission on the sales price cannot be working in the best interests of the buyer. Ever.”
They aren’t necessarily working in the seller’s interests either. The marginal commission of keeping prices high is normally secondary to a sale at all and this I am sure will become crystal clear in the next few years. It is during a strong buyer’s market, and in the extreme bidding wars, that things go out of whack. I’m sure we’ll be kicking around the phrase “selling wars” at some point.
There have been discussions here, on Chipman’s blog, and RETalks about alternative ways to pay Realtors. I don’t think it’s a simple problem to solve. The best we can do is to educate people that they are effectively on their own when it comes to price negotiation. A Realtor I used in the past was very open about this. Again, I think he did this because of his reputation and the chance of future business, not because he was altruistic.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Mold City, Thanks, those are good observations regarding the mechanisms at work. Probably next year would be a better time to make the move, assuming there will be a crash of course which I think is inevitable …. but timing is so hard to call.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:49 am
despair: just make sure you know what you’re in for, take a look around at rental listings, and I assume you guys have jobs you’re coming for that pay decently? According to statscan we’ve suffered the biggest drop in income in Canada. There’s tons of minimum wage jobs available here, but living expenses mean with that income you’d be living in a basement suite with roommates, so make sure you’ve got the income figured out before moving to Vancouver.
I suspect that if our market is anything like the busting US bubble cities you can expect rentals to get tighter temporarily. Many people are selling right now and if they’ve decided to wait out a crash they’ll be looking for rentals as well. In Miami this meant rents went up a bit around their peak before everything came crashing down.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:39 am
patriotz,
you hit the spot! it’s simple logic. they should have laws against this bullshit.