On a Monday morning where the TSX started off the day with a fresh 1200 point plummet we’ve got more negativity about the local real estate market on the front page of the Vancouver Sun: I bought a house at exactly the wrong time.
And the chances of Vancouver prices actually dropping? Maybe two out of 10, I surmised. (Most of my friends, who at dinner parties often talked about how their soaring real estate was ensuring their retirement, thought I was slightly crazy to even think such a thing.)
As you might have guessed, my resolve had finally weakened. So, in the spring of 2007, I bought a piece of paradise. The odds seemed on my side, I decided. At first the prices seemed to keep soaring.
Soon I was telling people at dinner parties how much my house had gone up, too.
Now I’m back to where I started.
The real-estate-disaster bloggers actually were prescient. Wall Street is melting down because of the junk mortgages. Bay Street is in a tailspin. Now my almost daily question is what’s going to happen here?
Yep, the bloom has come off the rose when stories like this are on the front page. Although we still have a huge problem with affordability, Vancouver house prices have dropped below where they were one year ago. sales have dropped right off and listings continue to grow as the global economic forecast gets dimmer and dimmer. For many there’s still time to make out with a profit, but the competition is growing fiercer as we race for the bottom.
“I wouldn’t feel bad about buying,” said Jock, listening to me fret. “Nobody saw this coming. We’re in a hurricane, but in a hurricane you don’t know how bad it is until it’s over. And it’s not over.”
Nobody saw this coming and nobody could have predicted that the experts would say ‘nobody saw this coming’ right? I bet you also couldn’t guess what Bob Rennie has to say about the whole Vancouver housing market crash:
Rennie also believes the fundamental reality is there’s no oversupply of housing and condos in the city of Vancouver, as there is in many U.S. cities now seeing the market tank. He also sees a strong demand for Vancouver’s high-end real estate by rich people from afar.
“I wouldn’t sell right now,” Rennie said. “In fact, I just bought a few more units myself.”
I’ll be back in a short while, I’m just going to go ask a car dealer if its a good time to buy an SUV.
