Vancouver Condo Info

Love Data? Eric has been tracking a specific North Van market and shares the raw data with you here:

Dear Readers,

I have spent over a year diligently noting the numbers of listings on MLS for the lower mainland from certain price points under 1 million dollars. My initial reasoning for taking on this endeavor was to allow me to have better insight into this crazy marketplace that can be very difficult to understand. My goal is to live on the north shore with my wife in a single detached home so all of the information I have gathered refers specifically to single detached.

As you can see from my excel sheet there are several categories: From the left are statistics specific to the North Shore. A realtor sends me any SDH listing on the North Shore (Deep Cove to Lions Bay) under 1 million. I have broken that number down by price into several categories (0-500K, 500K – 600K, 600K – 700) I then have a total listings number for SDH on the north shore under 1 mil and specifically West Van houses under 1 mil. The next categories are for the lower mainland in general. These categories range from 0 -400K, 400K – 500K etc. until 900K – 1 mil. I then have a total for all the listings and a day to day change as well as a total North Shore listings as a percentage of Lower Mainland listings.

There are several inherent flaws with my statistics that you should be made aware of if you haven’t guessed them already. Firstly, the information I get for the Lower mainland homes is from MLS by taking the same snapshot (9 reverse clicks from Knight and Kingsway) every day at the same time Monday to Friday. Secondly, I only have statistics up to 1 million dollars when many of the homes in the lower mainland exceed that price point. Thirdly, when comparing year on year stats by price point you must take into consideration that since prices have moved up over that same amount of time then one must consider that fact when looking at comparisons.

The conclusion that I have drawn based on the most recent YOY numbers is that listings are WAY down. As I mentioned above, some of this is due to the increase in price but I still see a substantial decrease in listings (closing in on down 40% YOY). This is a very fascinating statistic since many of the Real Estate Board stats have shown sales decreasing at a steady pace over the past year. This leads me to believe that there is a huge shadow inventory on the market that will slowly be unleashed over the next year. I have no reason to believe that wide spread sales will pick up since any manner for people to get access to money will dry up further over the next several years (interest rates hikes, taxes, CMHC insurance regulations, consumer debt loads). When this inventory rears its head we will see supply finally begin to win the battle over demand which will send prices down where hopefully they get to more normal levels. This deleveraging will take a couple of years to fully realize.

For me this has been an exercise in watching a pot trying to reach a boil. The thing is eventually it will. But watching it certainly hasn’t sped things up.

If there is a positive response to this package of statistics then I will gladly send it to VCI every quarter or whenever it is deemed to fit well. I want to thank VCI and all of the other bear blog/forum sites that are fighting the good fight. I worry for our country over the next decade, but I think we’ll all be just fine in the end.

Best regards,

Eric

Click here to download the XLS file and please share any analysis you may do with the rest of us, either in the forum or here in the blog comments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 1:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.