Froogle Scott buys a Vancouver house
The Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive (VREAA) has been doing a great job of collecting anecdotes from the great Vancouver housing bubble for a while now, and many reader here will be familiar with that site. VREAA is now running a series called Froogle Scott that follows along the experience of one local homebuyer who bought early in the run-up.
September 2003
My wife and I, first time buyers, purchase a 1940s stucco bungalow in the Grandview area of East Vancouver for the asking price of $355,000. This is about a year and a half into the current eight-year real estate boom/bubble. The lot size is 33 x 117, just slightly smaller than standard. The MLS listing gives the square footage of the house as 1860, which later turns out to be a 20% exaggeration. The house is only about 1550 square feet, split over two levels — the main floor, and a two-bedroom, ground-level rental suite. The rental suite is tenanted — a quiet single mum with stable employment and her teenaged son, who look at us with a certain amount of trepidation when we first tour the house. They needn’t worry. We’re happy to inherit good tenants, and do not increase their rent ($560 a month, plus 40% of the utilities) for the year and a half that they continue to live in the suite.
……. We avoid a bidding war because of the listing agent’s greed. She wants to sell the house to her own clients and pocket both ends of the commission (“double-ending”). So she doesn’t have an open house. And the home owners perhaps aren’t savvy enough to demand that she have one.
Read the whole first installment at the VREAA site.
RSS 2.0 comments feed. leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Sure thing VREAA, it’s a good read. Please post a link on this site when the next installment goes live.
January 26th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Thanks for the posting, pope.
The second episode comes out later this week. It deals with house price appreciation and how the thought of accumulating all that money affects one’s life.
January 25th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Woah 9 times income. Craaazy!
January 25th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Bull trolls? You idiot bears have been calling for a huge decline for years yet the market continues to make new highs. The “trolls” have been right, the bears have been DEAD WRONG.
January 25th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Yet still the bull-trolls will deny the inevitable correction.
January 25th, 2010 at 11:14 am
same here:
http://www.financialpost.com/n.....id=2482163
Vancouver ’severely unaffordable’, study shows
January 25th, 2010 at 11:12 am
news link of the day:
http://www.news1130.com/radio/.....-vancouver
“Most unaffordable housing market in the world? Vancouver.
The average house is more than nine times the average annual salary..
Vancouver is number one but it’s not exactly the best list to top. A report by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy shows Vancouver has the most unaffordable housing market in the world…”
January 25th, 2010 at 10:13 am
@rp:
And when you read about it in the G&M you know that the movers and shakers have already been talking about it.
There is only one thing that will bring any sense to the “Conservatives”, and that’s if the bond markets start getting ugly with the GoC. No doubt they have already been told quietly to get their act together and that if CMHC guarantees and debt don’t get capped soon we are going to be looking at a downgrade in the GoC’s credit rating. Which would result in higher interest rates for all CAD debt.
But if they cap CMHC’s guarantees, that will bring down the house of cards in BC and other overpriced RE markets, and wreck CMHC’s, and thus the GoC’s, balance sheet. No way out.
The Cons decided to play the dangerous game of inflating a Canadian housing bubble to try to create a false impression of prosperity and they are going to lose it.
One blooper in the article:
The originator, i.e. the first lender, buys the mortgage from the borrower, like any other debt instrument. It can then sell the mortgage to another party to get it off the books.
January 25th, 2010 at 9:34 am
CMHC bank subsidy and public liability attracts MSM attention:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com.....le1442688/
January 25th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Couldn’t believe the way that realtor behaved. Realtors are today’s stock brokers. The internet basically wiped out most of the redundancy in stock brokers, the hefty commissions they charged, and basically removed the middle man. The Competition Bureau of Canada attacked MLS for not letting consumers have direct access last fall. Let’s face it, if that happened that would dramatically reduce the amount of people using real estate agents. Even if they don’t end up opening up MLS (which they probably won’t), Google has already started the wheels in motion:
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/realestate/
This just in… Home sales down 17% in December for the US where the median home is 178K and the incentive of $8000 for first time home buyers still can’t reflate their markets. Guess those rebates didn’t actual create demand, it just stole it from future buyers. Canada’s housing sales surged 75% higher in 2009 over 2008 due to the emergency interest rate cuts and a surge in CMHC’s insurance ceiling. Wonder how much demand was stolen from 2010 for us?
January 25th, 2010 at 8:54 am
First!!!!