Downtown townhouse market update
YLTNboomerang sent in this updated snapshot of the townhouse market in Coal Harbour & False Creek North, along with a chart showing days on market vs. sales price reductions. You can download the XLS here and here’s the price change over time chart:
I’ve started a new submarket tracker in the wiki and encourage anyone tracking specific Vancouver sub markets to share their information there. Email me if you add information there and I’ll create a blog post about it.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Scullboy: If you're interested, Roundel Cafe, 2465 E Hastings, is in urgent need of a cook. Great people, great crowd, recession proof, very foodie but not pretentious, 9 am open so none of those 5am start times (shudder). Eclectic and artsy. My fave brunch place.
Many "high end" restaurants are NOT recession proof, same for $70 basic haircut places. Funeral directors and divorce lawyers should be safe, and anyone supplying reasonably priced things everyone needs.
Oh, and repo men!
WBWYCmovetheafterpartytotheroundel:
They will open an evening for a booked event, they have Crannog beer on tap, and they are great!
December 4th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Cook – no, less people are eating out
Hairdresser – heard of home based barbers :O
December 4th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Since I'm not working in a cookware store, I can confirm there are some excellent deals to be had out there. I'm not certain we can say for sure that deflation is in play and since it's been many years since I worked retail I can't compare this year to any other. However I *CAN* say there's an excellent Bodum with 2 cup set on sale for $29.99 .
Regular price on that is $70.00
I get the feeling there's a bidding war going on amongst retailers. I also noticed a Le Creuset pot in Costco. Normally it would have cost a good $500 as recently as …. say…. 2005. It's selling for $199.00
The people I work with are convinced their store is "recession free" because people wil move from expensive restaraunts to eating at home. While I'd agree with that assesment, there are many variations on pots and pans and cookware out there. I think the only totally recession free occupations are:
Cook
Hairdresser
Funeral Director
Divorce Lawyer
December 4th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Mickey — you are brilliantly obsessed. Excellent work with the condo/sfh correlation. That makes me feel better since I'm after a house.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Haha, brilliant eh? Well I would agree with you Lily pad as regards some of the other posters on this site, but not appropriate in my case… I would accept "brilliantly obsessed" though!
How obsessed? Well for example, using the REBGV's average price graph that dates back to 1977 (y'know, the price graph that we were all viewing again just yesterday when the November numbers were released) I calculated the relationship between condo/townhome prices and single family home prices. The correlation as expressed by the r-squared was something like "0.94" which is a pretty strong correlation.
What it means in plain English is that if downtown condos should "tank" someday then we could expect that single family home prices would fall as well.
It was even possible to calculate a pretty straight forward formula for estimating the average price of a SFH if you were given the average price of a condo and a townhome. If I remember right, the formula was:
Y = 2.24X – 65.7
where Y = single detached home price (,000's)
and X = simple average of attached and apartment averages (,000's) all as taken from the REBGV average price graph.
That was back in 1998 so the numbers have probably changed.
All I wanted to do was to determine if there was a strong correlation or not between the two apparently disparate markets. If I recall correctly I did this because someone speculated that condo prices and townhouse prices could fall while SFH prices could remain solid. The theory being that single family homes were "different" because of the land component and because they were ultimately dealing with two different buyers.
Well, it's not so… it turns out that the two markets are entirely linked.
If you think about it, the conclusion of a strong correlation makes sense. If condo prices were to fall while East side and West side house prices stayed strong then some homeowners would sell and buy condos and pocket the huge difference… thereby leveling out the market by putting downward pressure on homes and upward pressure on condos.
That's good news for real estate bears because the massive oversupply of condos that is coming down the track – and which will be hitting the market over the next twenty four months – is largely in the form of condos.