Vancouver Condo Info

Just so you know, Canada’s banks are in fine shape. Not the sort of ‘fine shape’ that US banks were in last year, but real, honest to goodness fine shape.  But just in case, Ottawa is considering options to aid Canadian banks if the current global economic crisis persists.

And news from around the globe hasn’t been real great lately.  A number of large US banks have failed, a record setting US bailout bill has been passed and the US government is now considering taking an ownership stake in banks (because what restores confidence more than government ownership?).

Meanwhile in the UK, they’ve already taken the step of partially nationalizing their banking system.  The fallout from the global credit boom is turning bust in a bad way, look at whats happening in Iceland for just one example.  The IMF has just announced the activation of an emergency funding scheme that was last used during the 1995 Asian economic crisis.

From previous discussion on this site I know that many of you are sitting on a cushion of cash, some above the $100k CDIC insured limit.  Are you worried about the health of the Canadian economy and our banking system? Do you understand the ins and outs of CDIC insurance?  Are you making any changes to your banking habits to prepare for possible problems?

The CIBC economic forecasting dartboard hasn’t been remarkably accurate lately, so I’m not sure how to take this most recent prediction from Benjamin Tal who believes ‘a gradual slide’ over the next 8 to 10 months will see house prices across Canada drop another 5 or 10 percent.

Sales activity will also drop by an average of about 20 per cent from current levels before stabilizing near the end of 2009, Mr. Tal, senior economist at CIBC World Markets Inc., said in an interview after his speech Tuesday before an income fund industry conference.

By this time next year the market will level off as conditions in the Canadian economy stabilize, he said. However Canadians shouldn’t be waiting for a “V-shaped recovery,” at that point, but instead should expect both home prices and sales to remain relatively flat, he added.

“What we are saying is that prices will continue to ease in the coming months, but there will be no U.S.-style freefall,” Mr. Tal said.

Canada should be in buyers’ market territory by late 2008 or early 2009 for the first time since 2001, he added.

Of course that’s the prediction for all of Canada - in western cities like Vancouver, Mr. Tal says that prices are likely to fall double digits by the end of 2009… So I guess thats anywhere between 10% and 99%?  Thanks CIBC!

Gah just posted this link, looks like Millennium Water might need a bail out:

As the credit crisis south of the border begins to creep north, concerns are mounting over the impact it may already be having on construction of the athletes’ village for the 2010 Winter Games.

Last week, members of Vancouver’s city council held an emergency, in-camera meeting to get an update on the project. Much of the discussion revolved around the city’s obligation in the event the developer, Millennium Development Corp., can’t meet demands from the bank because of massive cost overruns, according to sources briefed on the meeting.

The best part? Even if you haven’t been speculating on Vancouver condos, now you get a chance to take part in the collapse since it looks like the City is on the hook for cost over-runs on this particular project.  But don’t fret, the absolutely ‘worst case scenario’ at this point looks like a $100 million dollar bill for Vancouver tax payers.

On a Monday morning where the TSX started off the day with a fresh 1200 point plummet we’ve got more negativity about the local real estate market on the front page of the Vancouver Sun: I bought a house at exactly the wrong time.

And the chances of Vancouver prices actually dropping? Maybe two out of 10, I surmised. (Most of my friends, who at dinner parties often talked about how their soaring real estate was ensuring their retirement, thought I was slightly crazy to even think such a thing.)

As you might have guessed, my resolve had finally weakened. So, in the spring of 2007, I bought a piece of paradise. The odds seemed on my side, I decided. At first the prices seemed to keep soaring.

Soon I was telling people at dinner parties how much my house had gone up, too.

Now I’m back to where I started.

The real-estate-disaster bloggers actually were prescient. Wall Street is melting down because of the junk mortgages. Bay Street is in a tailspin. Now my almost daily question is what’s going to happen here?

Yep, the bloom has come off the rose when stories like this are on the front page.  Although we still have a huge problem with affordability, Vancouver house prices have dropped below where they were one year ago. sales have dropped right off and listings continue to grow as the global economic forecast gets dimmer and dimmer.  For many there’s still time to make out with a profit, but the competition is growing fiercer as we race for the bottom.

“I wouldn’t feel bad about buying,” said Jock, listening to me fret. “Nobody saw this coming. We’re in a hurricane, but in a hurricane you don’t know how bad it is until it’s over. And it’s not over.”

Nobody saw this coming and nobody could have predicted that the experts would say ‘nobody saw this coming’ right?  I bet you also couldn’t guess what Bob Rennie has to say about the whole Vancouver housing market crash:

Rennie also believes the fundamental reality is there’s no oversupply of housing and condos in the city of Vancouver, as there is in many U.S. cities now seeing the market tank. He also sees a strong demand for Vancouver’s high-end real estate by rich people from afar.

“I wouldn’t sell right now,” Rennie said. “In fact, I just bought a few more units myself.”

I’ll be back in a short while, I’m just going to go ask a car dealer if its a good time to buy an SUV.

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.

(more…)

Realbiz pointed out this story in the Globe and Mail this morning: A recent report from Merrill Lynch Canada is warning of a Canadian housing market crash and mortgage meltdown similar to the one currently eating away at the US economy:

Canadian households are more financially overextended than their counterparts in the United States or Britain, a report issued by Merrill Lynch Canada economists David Wolf and Carolyn Kwan says.

“We’re just now starting to see house prices fall in Canada, and sharp rises in unsold home inventories increasingly imply that this will not be a transitory phenomenon … From this perspective, the absence of a Canadian credit crunch to date may be cause for concern, not comfort,” their report says.

They say it’s only a matter of time before the “tipping point” is reached and the housing and credit markets crack in Canada.

Stephen Harper was asked to comment on this at a campaign stop in Vancouver, where he rejected the economists conclusion:

“Firstly, we have seen that the housing market and the construction market are much stronger in Canada than in the United States. We don’t have the same situation here with mortgages as was the case in the United States with the subprime mortgages there. And so therefore I think our market is in a much stronger position.”

Merrill Lynch Canada says the main concern is the way Canadian households have overextended themselves and carry a large quantity of debt.  The housing and construction market may currently be stronger than it is in the US, but there’s no guarantee that it will stay that way:

“What worries us is that Canadian households have been running a larger financial deficit than households in either the U.S. or the U.K.,” the Merrill report says. “… After 40 years of net saving, Canadian households moved into sustained deficit in 2002. In 2007, household net borrowing amounted to 6.3 per cent of disposable income, a wider deficit than in the U.K. and not far off the peak U.S. shortfall seen in 2005.”

The economists say the data imply that Canada’s household sector is now overextending itself as much as the United States or Britain ever did.

Surreyjoe posted a link to this article in the Vancouver Sun about incentives designed to lure condo buyers.  The article covers a number of projects in the lower mainland that are using a variety of incentives to try to get units sold:

Bosa said the summer was also a slow period for sales, and “we figured we would do a bit of an advertising blitz” to spark more interest, which has worked to drive more traffic to its sales centre.

Developer Ledingham McAllister is offering different incentives on a couple of its projects — a $10,000 decorating allowance on units in its Silhouette project and five-per-cent cash back on September sales in its Perspectives building near Lougheed Town Centre.

Ledingham McAllister president Ward McAllister said incentives are offered during slow sales to encourage buyers “to get off the fence” so the company can meet its sales targets, but he hasn’t seen more than minimal discounting.

“I don’t think there’s much discounting going on in the market at all,” McAllister said. “People are thinking that prices are going to come down, and we don’t believe they are.”

It may or may not be true that theres ‘not much discounting going on’, but there certainly are a lot less sales happening.  Perhaps I’m missing something here, but aren’t incentives just an attempt at hiding price drops?  If you throw in a “$10,000 decorating allowance” or a “free honda fit” isn’t that just a price drop of that amount?

For the first time in a long time it looks like the economy may be the top issue in this election.  With big price increases in food and fuel, house and condo prices dropping, unemployment edging up and incomes stagnant (except for public service executives) more and more Canadian voters are looking for answers and comfort in times of increasing economic uncertainty.

Strangely enough, most Canadians were feeling pretty good about the economy until the summer, even with a severe downturn in the U.S. battering some key Canadian industries.

While big manufacturing industries like automakers and lumber mills have felt a brutal squeeze as U.S. consumers slashed purchases of homes and cars, other parts of the economy picked up the slack because Canadians kept on spending.

They could do this largely because prices remained sky-high for Canada’s resource exports — petroleum above all, but also things like metals, coal and potash, a key component in fertilizers. There was also a boom in the value of grain and other agricultural commodities.

As a result, the cash flowing in from trade kept Canada’s domestic economy much stronger than the GDP numbers suggested. True, manufacturing slashed 67,300 jobs in the 12 months ending in August, but even so, total employment grew by 224,000 jobs in this period, thanks to gains in areas like construction, professions and services.

However, the looming problem for the Harper government was that the gusher of money from exports of high-priced resources tapered off as oil, grains and other products dropped in value by late in the summer. Yet many Canadians continued to feel the lingering impact of food and fuel inflation.

By July, job creation had stalled and gone into reverse, leaving unemployment a little higher than it was last winter. At the same time, July’s inflation rate, at 3.4 per cent, was the highest in five years.

Are you concerned about inflation / deflation / stagflation and is the economy a key issue for you in this election?  Do you think that any Canadian politician has the ability to improve our economy while our largest trading partner is going through major financial difficulties of its own and facing ongoing fallout from a burst housing bubble?

Thats according to UBC Sauder School of Business professor Tsur Somerville.  Its not just the Vancouver housing market that’s taking a dive - all across Canada things are slowing down, listings are high and many markets are seeing price drops.  Calgary and Vancouver have seen some of the largest price drops, but Toronto also saw a 1 percent price drop in August for the first time in ten years.

“The boom in the housing markets is definitely over,” Tsur Somerville, a professor in the Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia said in an interview. “Depending on where you live, you can likely expect prices to fall further.”

Somerville, in a study released this month, looking at the relationship between house price and rents estimates that housing prices in some Canadian cities such as Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal, would have to drop as much as 20 per cent to be in balance. The professor found only Toronto and Edmonton house prices were not overvalued in the first half of 2008.

Put another way, average Vancouver house prices would have to fall by $85,000, in Winnipeg it would be $74,000 and Ottawa $81,000.

Just because homes are overpriced doesn’t mean the market will plunge to equilibrium, Tsur said.

Toronto housing prices are not out of line because they have not had the explosive growth of other cities, Sommerville said. “Some cities look way out of line when you run the numbers, but Toronto is bang on.”

Sommerville cautioned that the study was based on existing detached home prices and rents and did not include condo stocks.

I wonder what that study would show if you included data from the price/rent ratio of condo stocks.. We do have quite a few condos in this fair city of ours, with thousands more currently under construction.