Hey guys, Ten Volt here – World’s busiest real estate agent in the world – and I’ve got something exciting to share with you. I’ve started to ‘vlog’ or ‘Video Blog’ despite my busy schedule. How do I handle it you ask? I do it in my car. I’m hardcore.
Remember, if you need a condo, a townhouse or just advice on how to live in a luxury car, you give me a call. Ten Volt is here for you and I’ve got car payments to make. Follow me on the twitter or drop me a comment on the youtube. Be safe and wear your seatbelt.
One metric that nicely captures both the credit and mass psychology components of the current Canadian real estate craze is the total dollar amount of mortgage loan approvals as a percentage of GDP.
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The total amount of mortgage debt would be expected to rise, but in a healthy and sustainable real estate market, it would rise in tandem with GDP growth, meaning loan approvals as a percentage of GDP should stay range bound. That they haven’t is but one more indication that this is a market driven by unsustainable dynamics.
In an editorial the Vancouver Sun says the best way to afford a house in Greater Vancouver is to buy a house far outside of Greater Vancouver:
That being said, RBC’s average price of a standard two-storey house of $843,300 may understate the case because there is virtually nothing detached on the west side for under $1 million and it’s slim pickings on the east side as well. Indeed, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says its benchmark price for all single detached homes in Metro Vancouver is $902,000. However, anyone prepared to commute can buy a lot of house nearby at prices far below those in the city. Detached homes can be had for just over $500,000 in Squamish, less than hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver; and $360,000 in Mission, at the end of the West Coast Express line. There are also bargains – relatively speaking – in Tsawwassen, Coquitlam, Langley and Surrey and other Lower Mainland communities.
Now I know that for most of you $133k is nothing, but for some of us that’s real money.
“A combination of more subdued job and household income growth, rising interest rates, the recent tightening in borrowing rules for insured mortgages and fewer first time home buyers are expected to be the chief culprits behind the slowdown,” TD says.
Vancouver’s real estate market will fare the worst in the next two years. TD predicts a 25.4-percent peak-to-trough decline in sales and a 14.8-percent pullback in prices by 2013.
Of course everyone knows that different housing sectors drop at different rates and TD is predicting the worst carnage in the Condo market. What do you think will suffer the largest price drops – west side houses or east side condos?
Here in Vancouver a ‘luxury home’ is one that costs more than 3 million and looks like a $300k house in Tampa. And that’s just the market segment that is set to soar this year.
The 2010 total has already been surpassed, with 384 homes over the $3-million price point sold so far in 2011, according to Macdonald Realty.
There have also been 66 homes over $5 million sold so far, and a predicted 132 over$5 million by the end of the year.
A total of 40 condos over $3 million have so far been sold, including seven over$5 million.
However, the trend partly reflects price increases that have pushed previously cheaper homes over the $3-million luxury home threshold.
The trend is your friend, get in now while prices are going up.
As the smoke from burning cars rises above the downtown vancouver skyline it’s time to mark the peak of the vancouver housing bubble. Hype and excitement can only get you so far, eventually the bill has to be paid.
Downtown will get cleaned up pretty quickly, broken glass will get replaced, the fires will be put out. Our reputation as the worlds biggest sore losers may last a little longer, but that too will fade.
The ride down for house prices? Thats going to take longer and hurt a lot more people in the long run, but eventually the bill has to be paid.
Local realtor / hype artist Cam Good is in the news again with some advice for people that are unhappy with the current market or think there’s some imbalance with current house prices: move somewhere else.
The video is also available on the Global News website. Hat tip to southseacompany for the link.
”We are in the beginning of an international movement of money of historic proportions, something on the scale of the Marshall Plan after World War II or the British influence after the First World War,” said Jon C. Minikes, a partner at Jones Lang Wootton, an international real estate consulting firm. Besides real estate, the Japanese have become major investors in stocks, bonds and artwork in the United States.
Asp pointed out this column in the financial times about Vancouver consistently making it into ‘top livable city’ lists, but not drawing lots of population or interest on a global scale:
Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well … a little dull. Who would want to watch a film set in Vancouver? To see its skyscrapers destroyed by aliens or tidal waves, its streets populated by cops and junkies, its public buildings hosting romantic reunions? Yet Vancouver (original name, Gastown) has also spent more than a decade at the very top of the charts of the best city to live in the world. Can that really be right?
No. Not at all. In fact, Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more.
