You were feeling all proud about the number of empty homes in Vancouver weren’t you? 25 thousand, that’s a lot, but Toronto just had to outdo us:
Hold my beer Vancouver, we got this. The newly released 2016 Census numbers from Statistics Canada, show the City of Toronto saw Vancouver’s 25k+ unoccupied homes, and trumped it by another 74k units. Now with over 99k unoccupied homes in the city, speculation of Toronto real estate might be worse than previously thought.
Read the full article here.
[…] –housing bubble has burst […]
what happened to my BC weather post, VCI?
ahhh, y’know Global warming BS, el nino, knock your socks off, gonna get cold and wintery again in Canada, reversion to the mean, just like your precious Soros snowflake RealEstate.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/after-epic-snows-torrential-rains-aim-at-bc/79102/
Multiple road closures amid high avalanche risk in B.C.
blah, blah blah… but this line caught my eye
SPRING IS AHEAD: How will a developing El Niño impact our spring weather? The Spring Forecast premieres Monday, February 27 at 9 p.m. ET
‘The housing bubble has burst’: Economist warns market imbalances are threat to economy in long run
Garry Marr | February 10, 2017 1:49 PM ET
Duh. No kidding. I wonder if this guy saw it coming or just had a look in the rear view mirror like Michael Campbell always does?
Boombust – Who is “this guy”?
Isn’t this written by the same person who predicted a 25 percent drop in 2015?
Lot buying continues in Van West yesterday:
1. 4519 BLENHEIM STREET, Dunbar,listed$2,498,000，assessed$2,255,900
2. 2735 W 5TH AVENUE, Kitsilano,listed$2,398,000，assessed$2,556,000
3. 4674 W 11TH AVENUE, Point Grey,listed$2,850,000，assessed$3,066,000
Trump renews security guarantees to Japan
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/politics/trump-abe-press-conference/index.html
More news from Australia. “Don’t expect Chinese to keep underpinning property market” http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wealth/dont-expect-chinese-to-keep-underpinning-property-market/news-story/2c5e75807d7a9c7bfb8bfebbfe48c9ba?nk=e2f5beae3aa5bab7ce13055c1825d401-1486751181 While $1 trillion of foreign exchange has flowed out from China over the past 18 months, in December that number fell to almost zero. That means no money was withdrawn, for example, to settle Australian residential purchases. Chinese buyers will continue having trouble settling global real estate purchases (think Australia, New Zealand and Canada) as banks are told they must balance their FX trades, with transactions as small as $US5000 ($6550) being scrutinised and currency conversion requests rejected, according to some commentators. The yuan has slid over the past 12 months to about 6.9 per US dollar. And as I have previously reported, investors including the hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital predict that the Chinese government will eventually have to undertake a steeper devaluation. To… Read more »
Looks like Oracle was right. Those 25502 unoccupied homes don’t include the temp residents living in them. Including students.
Thank you random poster who shows up today to support ChinaOne. #notasockpuppet
Just out on Bloomberg. We make the news again. The only person who thinks that is well is Christy Clark.
“Vancouver’s Empty Mansions Highlight Middle-Class Housing Woes”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/vancouver-s-empty-mansions-highlight-middle-class-housing-woes
The number of residents on Vancouver’s west side — long favored by families and an easy commute to downtown — has fallen 3 percent since 2001, in contrast to 5 percent growth in population across the whole city, Yan said. The median single-family house can cost as much as C$4.9 million in that area — about 65 times Vancouver’s median household income. David Eby, a member of British Columbia’s legislative assembly, last year identified C$57.1 million worth of residences bought by students reporting no income in his west-side district of Point Grey.
Is Trump’s style ‘contagious’ in new tribal Twitterverse? Let’s hope not, say Canadian experts
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-premier-christy-clark-trump-style-contagious-politics-tribal-1.3974295
the latest from Ian Young…
Vancouver’s foreign buyer tax and the work-permit loophole ‘you could drive Highway 99 through’
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2069712/vancouvers-foreign-buyer-tax-and-work-permit
This is essentially lifting of the foreign buyers tax. Hearing rumours that it starts March 1st.
Pent up foreign demand going to cause a massive spike in prices with this low inventory.
The great unwashed voters will only remember their hero Christy Clark taxed those meanie foreigners 15%. They won’t pay attention to the work-permit loophole. It’s a brilliant pre-election maneuver by the Liberals.
$3.5B Massey bridge gets environmental nod from B.C. government
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/massey-bridge-approval-1.3975258
>>> just a couple more rubber stamps…
This is the modus operandi. It applies to wine as much as to Vancouver RE.
“China’s Capital Controls Are Hitting Wine Lovers Where It Hurts”
“A lot of people in China suddenly have a different focus,” Tom Gearing, managing director at Cult Wines, which has £40 million ($50 million) of funds under administration, said in an interview. “They are now asking us questions like, ‘is it a good offshore investment?’ ‘is it a good way to put money into a physical, tangible asset?’ ‘is it linked to the yuan?’ and ‘is it correlated to financial markets?”’
Despite the latest attempts of Christy Clark and De Jong to bring back chinese buyers into our market, these buyers might nit have a lot of funds to spend:
“China Bitcoin Exchanges Halt Withdrawals After Central Bank Talk”
Xi Jinping is my favorite person right now. Certainly a lot more linear than Christy and her band.
Don’t give that gangster piece of shit too much credit, he’s no different from our mop-headed piece of shit.
It’s all about holding on to power, the people can go fuck themselves.
“People are living in garages with ten family members and paying close to NZ$400 for the privilege,” said Salesa.
It’s odd. I find two and three bedroom apartments and even small houses available around Aukland for under NZ$400 (this is weekly). Average for two bedrooms is around $500 in the city. The average weekly wage is about $1000. So for two average people, the average rent would be a quarter of their income.
Ten people is also a lot to put in a garage.
NZ $2400 a month. About the same as here. So it’s pricey.
Furnished
It is pricey, but wages seem quite a bit higher. I guess it’s all a matter of what people are used to and expect. I know Kiwis consider prices to be very high.
Avg salary in NZ $75k
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/281067/average-salaries-nudge-$75k-for-some
This is now the norm DT for the under boomer crowd.
WTF, is that shit legal? Safety issues? Is this transition to the 3rd world shitholles?
So it seems.
Reports from the rental house hunt. My wife has been diligently searching for a new rental house (5+ beds) in the North Burnaby area. Asking is in the $3000-$4800 region and the quality varies to a comical degree. We don’t have to be out until late summer, but the lack of supply is certainly concerning. In many cases after contacting the owner/agent, one discovers that you have no access to the garage and there’s a tenant on the basement. Many of the houses have been listed for several months but the asking rent stays the same. Many of the houses are empty and the agent informs me the owner is in China. Clearly they are not bothered by losing a few months rent. In 100% of the cases the owners have been Chinese or their agents have been Chinese. It’s… Read more »
We got dominated by those fucks. They literally made their playground here at the all levels. Very sad and tragic…
We is who? The country has just 150 yrs history with the name “Canada”. It is an infant. You are nowhere close to call it belongs to you or your kind – whatever your kind “we” means to you. Probably you don’t even know where you came from. Scotland? Italy? Austria? Russian Siberia? or maybe from China, 10 generations ago or maybe from Middle East 15 generations ago. I bet you carry a mixed blood. So which one is your kind?
If you have taken someone’s land, be prepared to lose it to someone else. Life goes on with or without you.
Hiding behind your lap top of course you can say anything you want. I would suggest you bring up your hatred on youtube with you face shown.
Sh*t. That’s not funny. I hope your wife isn’t withholding sex!!!
Shockingly she doesn’t blame me for our 2nd-class citizen renter status. She hates it, but doesn’t accuse me of spending too much time reading bear blogs in my tighty whiteys. It also helps she’s younger and makes a living playing in local bands and some solo gigs, so she’s still young at heart. Hopefully that answers your question!
Also, I do keep her somewhat calm by telling her that if this current housing correction doesn’t take prices down significantly, then we can use our investment portfolio to buy a Burnaby Mountain townhouse or maybe just move further afield and buy a house. So ultimately we do have options, but i do love my job and utilizing the local mountains, hence my desire to stay. but there will come a time….
I would call a half dozen rental management companies and mid-sized real estate agencies. At this time of year, all that is left on CL etc. is the dogs — things that nobody wanted. Plenty of rental vacancies (particularly at the higher end) are never advertised, they are simply placed. When I was looking here way back in the day, I had an agent take me on a tour of unlisted properties. Tenants such as yourself are rare gems but having great credit and impeccable references doesn’t help you when you are browsing CL. You want to get the word out to as many people who could benefit from it as possible. (I made a one-page PDF describing my family and my finances.) That way, when the end of the school year gets close, and the good places are about… Read more »
You should make them an offer. Rents are not carved in stone. If the place is empty for months they are probably getting desperate but since they are going through an agent the agent will not make the first move. And if they are renting the place out then they must have to cover some type of mortgage. In my area of South Burnaby there are 5 empty houses for rent within a two block radius of my place. 4 bedrooms are asking $2500/month. There is a 5 bedroom with suite for $3100. All these houses are owned by “investors” (speculators). Wife and I looked a one of the 4 bedroom places back in Dec. and it was ok but still not rented in Feb and the owner phoned us in Jan to ask us if we were still interested.
I would also add that the reason these investors/speculators are asking astronomical rents is because they have astronomical mortgages. They are not buying with all cash as legend would have it because these are the second tier Chinese who can’t afford to speculate in Vancouver proper.
It’s true that rents are not carved in stone, but the problem with paying a significantly lower rent than asked is that the owner is likely to see it as a stop-gap measure. Going forward, if surrounding rents rise, they will be keen to get you out and, even if rents do not rise, the owner may in an untenable situation as the mortgage payments are beyond what they can comfortably cover. If I was looking for a place for just one year, I would definitely make lowball offers. But for a long-term arrangement, you want to choose an owner who has their ducks in a row and can continue to provide the service for however long you want to use it.
VanRE Week in Review: https://youtu.be/uhy3v6H0qB8
A work permit “does not require you to work. It is permission to work, if you so choose,” he said.
“The gorilla in the closet, the real issue”, Kurland said, was whether or not a buyer was a tax resident of Canada, “reporting global income and property to CRA and paying taxes here.”
He just repeated what we already established here. This is a lame loophole to allow back a bunch of buyers who have no intention to work and pay significant taxes here.
Christy Clark is taking us all for a ride.
“So, who gets an exemption? So, does the government plan to extend the exemption to post-grad work permit holders, or holders of open work permits? The Ministry of Finance was non-committal when asked those exact questions.” This is going to be a total shit-show. Christy Clark wants to bring the chinese money back into the market. Our main hope is that Xi Jinping stops it from ever arriving here. But the intentions of our government are now clear. They can be summed up in the following sentence: “Now that the additional tax has effectively cut back the excessive demand we were seeing last year, we are in a position to make the adjustments necessary to help ensure we can keep attracting highly skilled workers.” They are talking as if prices were back down to reasonable levels. They think this adjustment… Read more »
Many work permits require you to work for the company named on the permit. Lose or quit your job and you have 30 days to leave the country.
If Christy Clark lets students and wives in, it will be as if the tax had never been approved.
She knows it, and if we let her have her way, we deserve the inevitable consequences.
not required for “open” work permits
Right. That’s why I specifically didn’t say “all”.
“This how you know something desperate is going on in China’s economy”
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/china-january-currency-outflows-2017-2
The 25,000 empty homes are mostly basement suites (residential units as per census) that the owner said exists but no one living in them (even though someone is) in order not to indirectly give info to CRA about rental income.
Census starts with a listing of ‘housing’ units. Then they count how many in each. Most homeowners don’t allow access to suites by simply saying no one is living there.
My rental is now officially designated a vacant residence because the landlord filled in the form he received saying ‘ZERO’ people live in that unit.
So I live in a ‘vacant’ apartment.
Thank you for your input, fake census worker.
Price change, upward?
7-6063 Iona Drive, Vancouver
Oct 27:$1,599,000 (assessed $1,679,000)
Feb 8: $1,669,000
Change: 70000.00 4%
They figured, might need a new car, piano or new teeth, implants…
trump effect and real new year.
HAM is coming back home! market is picking up!
http://www.ussholland.org/Submarines/Polaris%20Missile%20A3.jpg
admin, i need to be able to insert images into my posts and have them visible without ppl needing to click. it’s important for educational reasons.
No, it’s more important that we are spared the stupid images of your rockets blasting off.
There is an easy fix to this empty home problem: Link every home to a resident tax payer living in them. If no resident tax payer then tax the shit out of it: a 10% yearly fee of appraised value should suffice – perhaps rising by 5% annually. If they don’t like it the non-residents could always vote the politicians out…oh yeah non residents can’t vote! Tough!
Housing is for residents, it shouldn’t be the new version of a swiss bank account.
Now, that would certainly go some way in lowering prices and making housing affordable again. But we don’t want that, do we?
Try to send a letter to the members of our Provincial government, starting with Christy Clark. They would either ignore it, or come up with some convoluted story about defending the hard-earned equity of home owners.
By the way, what you are suggesting is just a version of what the UBC-SFU academics proposed last year. Christy Clark quite literally laughed in their face.
It’s going to happen eventually. Once the voters mostly don’t own, I see non-residents being taxed to death. Housing is the most obvious thing to tax, you can’t take it anywhere.
” Once the voters mostly don’t own, I see non-residents being taxed to death.”
That could be a very long wait. All indicators say that the ownership rate has been increasing during this bubble. It could take an awfully long time to get down below 50%, if ever.
I do think that governments are going to have to increase their share of tax revenue for RE eventually, for just the reason you state.
Yes, eventually. When we are all dead.
I would like to see some change within my lifetime. And it is not going to happen for years if Chrsity Clark gets back into office.
This is why, like it or not, I am going to vote NDP at the next election. It might cost me some money through additional taxes and such. But it is the only hope we have to change the current setup for access to (and taxation of) real estate.
Exactly, it’s been 10+ years of calling tops in this market and some of us are getting long in the tooth for a 25 year mortgage!
I’m right there with you. At this point I’m assuming I might be collecting CPP before I finish paying a mortgage.
There are thousands of people in your same boat. This is a displacement. Rich millionaires have pushed a whole generation to the sidelines.
Of course, sellers ould rather seel to millionaires than to comparably less wealthy locals.
As long as locals keep voting politicians who condone this state of affairs there is no way out. This could go on for another 10 years.
“Rich millionaires have pushed a whole generation to the sidelines.”
But that’s not what’s happened. Rather, that generation’s parents have kept them in the RE game by funding them.
Parents in a house, kids in a shitty condos. That is still displacement.
Have you seen the fish bowls that developers are building here? 700 sqft with sealed windiws, low ceilings, no sound insulation.
Displacement.
Or… one could take all that saved up money from not owning, and say good bye to this province and hello to another place where housing is reasonable.
There are not a lot of them in Canada. Although the bubble is the most extreme in BC, almost the entire country is overvalued.
Lol, like that phrase ” hard-earned equity”. And then some people take it seriously as a true fact.
What about a house full of students? You think UBC should be driven out of business too because there’d be nowhere for students to live (and consequently they’d choose a different institution) once landlords require a taxpayer to reside in their property?
UBC is shamefully condoning the abysmal behavior of student millionaires because they bring in a lot of cash. These kids behave like mobsters, driving around in their Porsches and Mercs, parking wherever, buying tutoring and getting homeworks done by third parties. I would not be surprised if some of them were sending stand-ins to take exams for them. The occurrence of cheating has steadily increased, triggering new guidelines.
Yet, UBC turns a blind eye. Pecunia non olet
Shut His Face Already is referring to all the poor local students who have to crowd 12 to a house, not the offspring of chinese criminals who get 7000 square feet all to themselves.
Just go on any of the Chinese forums (vanpeople) and you’ll see tons of people asking and paying top dollar for people to impersonate and take exams for them. It’s rampant.
All hell could break loose on the Chinese Yuan in coming weeks….
“China Approaches Breaking Point”
https://dailyreckoning.com/92458-2/
