Vancouver Condo Info

Not only have you made it to the end of another work week, but you’re looking at a long weekend!  Here’s a round up of a few news stories I’ve noticed this week:

-July 2008: Sales down, listings up
-Whistler is running out of Gas
-New Pattullo Bridge will have toll
-Bad realtors getting spanked
-CMHC expands bond program for banks
-GDP drop ‘a bit of a shocker‘
-Greenspan: US on ‘brink of recession‘

So what are you seeing out there? Post your news, links and anecdotes here and have an excellent long weekend!

note: any conversation on Vancouver, real estate or economics is allowed, please keep it civilized. When posting articles please only quote pertinent points and link to the original instead of pasting the entire article here. Pasting a link will automatically create a clickable hot-link. Thanks!

Sticker-Flicker is a term coined by Arit in last weekends Friday free-for-all post to describe a real estate sales sign that has a ’sold’ sticker applied, removed, and then applied again in any number of cycles.  This is a phenomena I’ve increasingly noticed myself lately in front of apartments, townhomes and houses around town.

There are a number of theories about the root cause of Sticker-Flicker ranging from a conspiracy to make it appear more sales are taking place to overzealous realtors applying the sold sticker upon recieving an offer, only to see the deal fall through.

Personally I believe its likely the latter. I have very little confidence in the organizational skills of people when it comes to conspiracy and I don’t really see the point anyways. The fact remains that we have over 20,000 places for sale in Greater Vancouver right now, the sellers market is over.  Would Sticker-Flicker really motivate someone to buy?

But maybe there’s something I’m missing.  What do you think- Have you noticed this phenomena?  What causes Sticker-Flicker?

YLTNBoomerang sent in some extremely detailed townhouse market tracking data for downtown Vancouver with the following note:

Hi,

Long time reader and sometimes contributor to your blog. I sold my place last March in Yaletown (townhouse on Marinaside Crescent) at $890/sqft and have been tracking townhouses in Vancouver ever since. More recently (January) I started recording changes in prices etc. on MLS in a increasingly large spreadsheet. I thought you might be interested in seeing how this specific slice of the market is reacting and have attached this sheet. Please feel free to use or distribute as you please.

Keep up the good work!

The information in this spreadsheet includes square footages, new listings and price changes from January 10 until July 29th (today).  Within the tracked time period for Waterfront townhouses in downtown Vancouver there have been 5 instances of asking price increases and 73 instances of asking prices being dropped.  The entire database is color-coded, with red indicating price increases and green indicating drops.

We discussed options for graphing the data included here, but neither YLTNBoomerang nor I could figure out the best way to do it, so here’s an open challenge to Vancouver real estate market data obsessives & excel graphing gurus: Can you figure out a way to present the information in this spreadsheet in an interesting and informative visual manner?

Click here to download the XLS document.

Want to share a graph? You can email it to me along with the name you’d like credited and I’ll post it here.  If you want to cut out the middleman (me) you can make a post in the discussion forum with any graphs or images attached and link to it in the comments below.

UPDATE: That was fast! Here’s a “day’s on market / price drops” scatter graph courtesy of an anonymous contributor:

UPDATE 2: Yet another anonymous graph-maker sent in this chart showing asking price per square foot for downtown town houses for the first half of 2008:

Todays Vancouver Province has an article on the growing risk of a US/UK style mortgage crisis in Canada. We’re building like crazy at a time when the rest of the world is slowing down, are we building our way into an over-supply situation or simply catching up?

Hall noted that housing starts in Canada are “soaring on the strength of the domestic economy and a huge dollop of very well-timed fiscal stimulus,” and that a continuing excess of housing starts over requirements means “Canada’s turn may come soon” for a housing crisis.

The report came in the wake of the Canadian government’s attempt to avoid a housing crisis by no longer insuring mortgages with more than 35-year amortization periods and less than five-per-cent down payments as of Oct. 15.

If fiscal stimulus results in overbuilding and a housing market crash, can it really be considered ‘well-timed’?

Hat tip to ‘bubblicious’ for the story link.

The Globe and Mail is reporting that tourist visits to Canada, particularly Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver have dropped significantly this year.  Fuel prices, a high Canadian dollar and a slowing global economy are all being blamed for this downturn:

The latest Statistics Canada numbers on travellers are from May 2008 and show that in the first five months of the year, nearly one million fewer visitors entered the country compared to 2007, a decline of more than 10 per cent.

In May alone, nearly 200,000 fewer tourists entered the country compared to the same month in 2007, a drop of seven per cent.

By contrast, more Canadians are choosing a vacation abroad.

Between January and May, nearly 2.5 million more Canadians left the country than did during the same period in 2007, a jump of almost 13 per cent.

A strong dollar means more Canadians leaving, and not enough tourists — mainly Americans — are arriving, said Mr. Klassen.

“Our travel deficit is ballooning,” he said. “It’s a huge concern.”

If fewer people are coming to visit Canada, does that mean fewer foreign buyers for our real estate markets, particularly the most expensive ones?

You made it to the end of the work week, congratulations! It’s Friday free for all time!  Here are a few stories I’ve noticed this week:

- we just hit 20,000 places for sale in Vancouver
- but we’re still building lots of new condos
- maybe that will solve our growing homeless problem
- it’s been a bad year for forestry
- the dollar is making us expensive for foreign companies
- fortunately the loonie is predicted to fall
- When will the US housing market bailout work?

So what are you seeing out there?  Post your news, thoughts and links here and have a great weekend!

note: any conversation on Vancouver, real estate or economics is allowed, please keep it civilized. When posting articles please only quote pertinent points and link to the original instead of pasting the entire article here. Pasting a link will automatically create a clickable hot-link. Thanks!

Deryk Norton of the Vancouver Island Strata Owners Association wrote in to let us know that VISOA has released their report on BC strata legislation deficiencies.  This is a follow up to this story we posted about in April.  Deryk mentions in his email that the Vancouver dailies haven’t covered this issue as they seem to more interested in ‘real estate boosterism’ than critical consumer issues.  Here is the text of the news release, with a link to the PDF report:

The Vancouver Island Strata Owners Association (VISOA) today released a report entitled Beyond the Sales Pitch: Ensuring Transparency and Accountability in BC Strata Developments. The report describes significant deficiencies in BC’s legislation affecting owners of 460,000 condominiums and other strata properties, or one in four taxable properties in the province.

This report comes after a series of public meetings with strata homeowners, written submissions from homeowners and consultation with homeowner associations on the mainland. Based on concerns expressed by strata homeowners, the report describes issues and proposes solutions. Most issues involve legislation deficiencies in transparency and accountability, including some corrected years ago in other jurisdictions. Highlights of deficiencies in BC’s legislation are:

• Requirements for disclosure of property condition and financial information that are inadequate for both strata homeowners and prospective purchasers,

•Lack of prosecution of developers operating contrary to strata legislation,

•Lack of an accessible and authoritative source of legislation interpretation to support the operation of strata corporations according to law,

•Dispute resolution provisions that effectively indulge irresponsible actions and leave disputes unresolved, and

•Standards for licensing strata managers that are ineffective in protecting the rights of strata homeowners.

VISOA will be taking this report to the provincial government and asking for a public review of the legislation affecting strata homeowners. It will also be available to other organizations and interested individuals”, said Felicia Oliver, VISOA President. The report can be viewed at www.visoa.bc.ca.

VISOA is a non-profit organization that has provided information and education services to strata homeowners and strata councils on Vancouver Island since 1973. It is independent of both government and the real estate industry.

There’s an interesting article in yesterdays New York Times about American debt, complete with interactive features and debt calculators to compare your debt load to others:  Given a shovel, Americans Dig Deeper into Debt.

Years of spending more than they earn have left a record number of Americans like Ms. McLeod standing at the financial precipice. They have amassed a mountain of debt that grows ever bigger because of high interest rates and fees.

While the circumstances surrounding these downfalls vary, one element is identical: the lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.

It is not just individuals but the entire economy that is now suffering. Practices that produced record profits for many banks have shaken the nation’s financial system to its foundation. As a growing number of Americans default, banks are recording hundreds of billions in losses, devastating their shareholders.

There’s a meme in the local media that Canadians are more financially conservative than Americans, and while that may certainly be true I wonder about Vancouverites specifically - With our negative savings rate, relatively low incomes and high housing costs are the residents of this city really that different from some of the more extreme US cases?

It’s time for our end of the week news round up and open topic discussion! Here are a few stories I’ve noticed, feel free to comment on these or add your own links in the comment section:

- Canada in a recession?
- Brace for inflation
- The stink of corruption?
- Job Market better than it appears
- Dropping house prices increase inflation?
- Vancouver homeless rights complaint
- You’re richer than you think.
- BC: Number 1 in property crime
- Flaherty: No housing bubble in Canada
- Bay Area prices drop 27% in one year
- Pitfalls of a cheaper US market
- US Rate hike debated
- Merrill Lynch: 1 year, $19.2 billion lost

So what are you seeing out there? Post your news, links and anecdotes here and have an excellent weekend!

note: any conversation on real estate or economics is allowed, please keep it civilized. When posting articles please only quote pertinent points and link to the original instead of pasting the entire article here. Pasting a link will automatically create a clickable hot-link. Thanks!

Yes, markets change and so do ‘expert opinions’. And what a difference just a few days can make! Housing markets change at such a glacial pace that they miss out on the exciting daily ups and downs of the stock market, but the flip side is that once they start to slide it can take years for them to hit bottom. You don’t have to look further than our closest neighbor to the south to see an example of this slow downward slide.

This gradual change makes it all the more remarkable that a local housing market ‘expert’ would be singing two different songs within the space of just a few days. Thanks goes to Condohype for pointing the evolving marketview of Cameron Muir:

• “There is no indication, at this point, of any kind of substantial decline in prices,” Cameron Muir, Friday, July 11 2008
• “It is perfectly reasonable to expect home prices will stay fairly flat or even decline a couple of per cent a year until affordability picks up.” Cameron Muir, Tuesday, July 15 2008

Skeptics take heart, because I already know what you’re thinking - its the wonders of vague wording: a couple of per cent does not equal a ’substantial decline’, so this is not a reversal. And maybe you’re right, except there’s this small point: how many years do we have to suffer declines of ‘a couple percent’ until ‘affordability picks up’? Particularly with a global economic slowdown, a local economy coming off a boom and new mortgage rules that require more fiscal responsibility from buyers? Would a sharp shock to the market that quickly restores ‘affordability’ be a worse scenario than 10 years of slow equity leakage?

In June the REBGV benchmark price for a house dropped by about $5500 to $765,654. From that starting point a drop of just ‘a couple percent’ is a loss of more than $15,000 a year. Of course now that these predictions appear to be changing on a weekly or even daily basis, perhaps we’ll be hearing about the next leg up soon.

Thanks again to Condohype for the tippage.

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