Vancouver Condo Info

From the Vancouver Condo Wiki - Expert Quote-tracker

It looks like the ‘correction’ phase of the Canadian real estate market cycle is picking up steam and Vancouver is strapped to the front on the locomotive.  Homeowners who relied on property values to boost their net worth are discovering that they’re suddenly poorer than they were a year ago:

When Pat Webb moved to Vancouver a year ago, she didn’t think twice about buying a condo in tony Kitsilano, among the hottest neighbourhoods in the city’s booming real estate market.

But in August, the 70-year-old retiree decided to move back to the United States. She had sensed Vancouver’s market was slowing, but a neighbour’s condo had sold a week earlier, so she too tried to sell.

She listed her one-bedroom, 705-square-foot condo for the price she paid – $509,000 – on Aug. 30. Ms. Webb has since reduced that to $485,000. It still hasn’t sold.

And condo owners in downtown Vancouver are predicted to suffer the most in coming years:

Condo owners in downtown Vancouver are at greater risk for price depreciation than single-family homeowners in the suburbs, a BMO Capital Markets economic analyst said Tuesday.

“Condo prices could drop faster because of overbuilding,” Robert Kavcic said in an interview. “When you have excess in the market, that pushes prices down.”

A BMO survey released Tuesday suggested B.C.’s housing starts have to fall by about 25 per cent from current levels to return the market to sustainable numbers.

For those wondering why people would hold on to an investment that by all measures is set to decline for years, you can blame denial, which can be an incredibly strong force.  For an example of denial at work just look to the US where prices have been falling for two years and realtors still struggle to get the message to owners who believe that their property is different and is actually gaining value.

The Canadian Real Estate Association has just released an updated housing market forecast and predicts that next year BC will see the steepest house sales price drops anywhere in Canada.

The association predicted a 7.8 per cent decline next year in the average residential sales price in B.C., compared to a 2.1 decrease across Canada.

Average price is forecast to reach new heights in six of 10 province in 2009, but B.C., where lower sales activity is expected, will continue to weigh on the national average price, the association said in a news release.

The association is forecasting an 11.7 per cent drop in sales activity in B.C. for 2009, compared to a three per cent drop across the country.

Hat-tip to Richard for the story link.

According to an article in today’s Sun the BC Real Estate Association is projecting a sales drop of 28% across the province this year, with a slight rebound in 2009 as consumers ‘recover confidence’.

Muir said home prices have been declining since their peak in the first quarter of 2008, but on balanced over the year, he expects the $453,000 average price to remain three per cent above the overall average home price of 2007.

Muir expects the average home price to decline nine per cent to $413,000 in 2009, but downward pressure on prices to ease by the second quarter of next year as homes become more affordable and inventories decline.

The BCREA’s prediction is the latest housing forecast to be released and is more optimistic about recovery than the forecast released last week by Central 1 Credit Union, which forecast prices to fall more steeply and sales recovering in 2010.

Meanwhile at an industry meeting in Ontario realtors got a pep talk about the current downturn as an oppourtunity to “raise the bar”.

Serious agents who stick out the downturn will have the opportunity to shine, they added, although their optimism appeared lost on some participants.

“They’re basically saying that next year is a writeoff,” one audience member said to colleagues at her table.

The downturn may have a silver lining, causing the industry to “raise the bar” on customer service, said panelist Michael Polzler, regional director at Re/Max.

“There are far too many agents out there who don’t specialize, who do just two or three deals a year. Would you use a part-time lawyer or a part-time dentist? We need to raise the bar,” Mr. Polzler said.

On a side note: I’ve started up an experimental Vancouver Condo Wiki If any of you feel the need to obsesively catalog predictions, track sub markets or share tips and links.  If this works out I’ll eventually add a link from the main page of this site. For now you can find it at http://vancouvercondo.info/wiki

The Globe and Mail is reporting today that Merrill Lynch & Co are growing more ‘alarmed’ that the Canadian housing market is tracking the US housing crash with a 2 year lag:

Falling prices, overbuilding and too much unsold inventory in Canada are creating a trend similar to that in the United States a couple of years ago, Merrill economists David Wolf and Carolyn Kwan said in a research note Tuesday.

“Though the consensus does seem to be gravitating towards our view of a sustained downturn in the Canadian housing market, we still do not sense any particular alarm in either the policy-making or forecasting community. We ourselves are getting more alarmed by the day,” Mr. Wolf and Ms. Kwan said in their report.

They aren’t the only economists to raise the warning about a two year lag, though many still emphasis the differences between the US and Canadian housing markets:

The same two-year lag idea was raised this summer by Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., who called the apparent trend “unnerving” in a report in July.

At the time, Mr. Porter said there were many reasons why the two markets were different, but said even a pale version of what had happened in the United States would be bad news for Canada.

House prices posted a record 16.6 per cent year-over-year decline in the United States in August, according to the benchmark S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report, also released Tuesday. The index has now shown year-over-year declines for 20 months.

Taking into account the two-year lag, Merrill’s data suggests the ramp-up in construction of housing units in Canada may be even larger than it was in the United States.

The number of units under construction currently is just off the peak hit in May, which was the highest recorded in 36 years of available data and 97 per cent above the long-term average, the report said.

By contrast at its peak in 2006, U.S. housing construction was 54 per cent above the long-term average, it added.

Of course, just like in the US its a bit vague to speak of a national housing market - the averages are pulled up in a boom and down in a bust by a few select cities, in our case Vancouver and Toronto are showing some alarming supply issues:

As of August, there were more condos under construction in both Toronto and Vancouver separately than there were in all Canadian cities combined a decade ago, Mr. Wolf and Ms. Kwan said.

“And as in the U.S. two years ago, we are now seeing completed units pile up unsold in Canada, a clear sign of overbuilding and an ominous sign given the voluminous supply still in the pipeline,” they said.

Inventories of unsold new single-family homes in Canada rose by 56 per cent year over year as of last month, close to the maximum increase in July 1990, which marked the last housing market downturn, the report said.

At the peak in April 2006, inventories of unsold new single-family homes in the United States were up 26.5 per cent over a year earlier, the report said.

The two-year lag could be the result of Canada having more room to run up because its recovery started later than that of the United States. Strong commodity prices and looser lending standards initiated in 2006 may also have contributed to the lag, the report said.

Hat-tip to Dingus for this link.

From an Article in the Vancouver Sun:

VANCOUVER - Dropping real-estate values are sending more British Columbians into financial crisis and causing a spike in personal bankruptcies, according to professional debt counsellors.

Federal Industry Ministry data show that B.C. consumer bankruptcy filings for August were up more than 10 per cent over the same period last year.

August also saw a 16.3-per-cent increase in proposal filings, an alternative to bankruptcy.

And that was an improvement over July, when B.C. consumer bankruptcy filings were up 14 per cent over the same period last year and proposal filings were up 20 per cent.

“It’s a big jump,” said B.C. Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals director Lana Gilbertson. “We don’t know if it will continue upwards, but during the recessions of 1981 and 1990-91 there were rapid increases in insolvency rates.

“Our professional community is seeing more and more individuals who can’t sell their property for what they thought it was worth and who can’t refinance or borrow more money against their property. They’re stuck,” she said.

For several years, Canadians have suffered from high levels of household debt, low rates of personal savings and feelings of stress about their finances, said Gilbertson.

“But a strong real estate market  in B.C. kept many afloat as homeowners were able to use a growing equity in their property to offset their consumer debt,” she said.

Funny how the answer to consumer debt was house debt, even after we saw how well that worked out in the US.  Meanwhile at least one economist is saying get ready for deflation:

Japan was mired in a nearly decade-long bout of deflation, which is defined as a sustained fall in asset prices. Economic theory indicates the solution to falling demand for prices is stimulus - either from the central bank, or by the fiscal authority to increase demand and borrow at interest rates that are below those available to private entities.

Rosenberg was one of the few economists on Wall Street who rang alarm bells about the housing bubble, and warned that the fallout from the bust on credit markets and the underlying economy would be huge. He now forecasts the worst consumer-led U. S. recession since the 1970s.

Other economists have also warned of a deflationary-like scenario, not just in North America but also Britain.

Here’s an open question for discussion and a bit of a scientific experiment.  I noticed a recent story on the UBC election stock market and that reminded me of a few other stories I’ve seen on prediction markets and their accuracy.  It turns out that in many cases the aggregate of a groups prediction or estimation is more accurate than individual experts, particularly when money is at stake.

Last month we saw year-over-year price loss in many areas of the lower mainland.  These drops were seen across all types of housing: condos, townhouses and detached homes, but the most dramatic price drop was seen in Port Moody which saw an astounding year over year price decline of 20.4% for the benchmark price of a detached house.  That number is so large, I initially thought this may be a typo or error, but it has remained in place throughout numerous news stories and the original REBGV housing price index table.

So lets do a little experiment.  Lets see if the readers of this site, as a group, can accurately predict which area of the REBGV will see the largest percentage decline in the benchmark price of a detached home.  To clarify: Which area of the lower mainland will show the largest monthly house price decline during the month of October 2008?  Vote below and when October REBGV benchmark stats are release we’ll see how accurate we’ve been:

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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!

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.

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.