Vancouver Condo Info

It’s Friday and that means it’s open topic free-for-all news round up time!  Here are a few stories I’ve noticed this week:

-Lower mainland house prices drop below 2007 levels
-Shiller: Canadian housing bust looms
-Plunge-O-meter: Van prices down more than $30k
-Quattro: Yaletown comes to Surrey, burns down
-Vancouver homeless top priority for Mayoral candidates
-55% of Canadian workers live paycheque to paycheque
-Ottawa: No need to boost deposit insurance
-Calgary house prices keep on dropping
-The next bubble: Equity and commodity markets?
-IMF: US likely headed for deep prolonged recession
-Global recession could drive oil to $50 in 2009
-Michigan home sells for $1.75

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

exx just posted this link, looks like its worth its own post.  The Vancouver sun is reporting that the house price drop in September was big enough to bring us below 2007 levels in most markets across the Lower Mainland.  Prices in Greater Vancouver have dropped 5.8% since May and are now 1.6% lower than September 2007.

The year-over-year price changes vary by market from up 3.6 per cent in Richmond where the benchmark was $$754,481 to down 20.4 per cent in Port Moody where the benchmark was $619,891 in September.

Total sales of all property types recorded through the Multiple Listing Service were 1,585 across the REBGV area in September, down 43 per cent from September a year ago.

REBGV September new listings, meanwhile, were up 29 per cent to 6,142 from the same month a year ago.

“After five years of unprecedented increases, housing prices are beginning to realign,” Dave Watt, REBGV president, said in a news release.

Any thoughts or comments on this news?

Recently we posted an updated spreadsheet compiled by YLTNboomerang that tracks downtown waterfront townhouse listings and price changes (here’s the original post).  Monterey just wrote in that he’s doing the same thing for downtown westend condos listed under $650k and he’s made that data available to all of us here in this excel spreadsheet.

-click here to download the xls document-

Here’s Monterey’s comments on this data:

First, I want to thank fellow blogger YLTNBoomerang who inspired me to create this list.  I live in the west end, and am interested in a two bedroom apartment.  I don’t want to buy something and spend the rest of my life paying it off, so I have been looking at price ranges that I would consider affordable.  $500K tops, plus a little cushion to follow the imminent downward trend, and my upper monitoring range is $650K.

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