Vancouver Condo Info

At the beginning of the month we saw a sharp drop in inventory, moving away from a near record high to a more moderate level for the season.

There are still a lot of properties for sale in Vancouver, but not the crazy highs we saw in the spring after the month end flush.

B5baxter has updated his inventory chart over at VancouverPeak.com and it looks like the last week has seen most of those properties come back on the market.

So we’re at a lower inventory level, but there is a sharp recent increase.

Any theories on what’s going on with listings?  Looks like there was a similar jump in July 2006:

Over at the Vancouver sun there’s an editorial by former BC supreme court justice Ian Pitfield proposing a rental vacancy tax.

This would be a tax that municipalities could impose to discourage vacant units held for speculation.

A vacancy tax would oblige a non-resident who beneficially owns housing accommodation in British Columbia, wherever the non-resident resides, to ensure that it is ordinarily occupied by the owner as a principal residence or available for rent at a competitive market rate. Failure to satisfy the requirements would result in liability for a vacancy tax equal to the monthly fair market rental value of the housing unit. The tax would be payable annually and not just at the time of purchase as is the case with the property purchase tax, or at the time of sale, as is the case with the income tax.A vacancy tax could increase the rental pool by some 15 per cent across the board, and by as much as 25 per cent or more in certain areas, if Mr. Yan’s estimate is correct. An increased supply of rental accommodation would also tend to put downward pressure on rents generally. The tax need not be seen as a bad thing by speculators. Avoiding the tax will produce income for the owner and offset the cost of owning and carrying the property in the course of speculation.

Read the full article here.

Is the market picking up after last years slide?

Troll shared these numbers in the previous thread:

Here’s some facts for the navel gazers to vote down:

Apr 1-15: 115 sales/day
Apr 16-30: 127 sales/day
May 1-8: 137 sales/day

Sales are strengthening during a time that they usually begin to fall off. MOI is also falling. Like it or not bears, this market is beginning to show some signs of strength. Not so simple to just dismiss as a bull trap.

Then frank pointed out we’re still pretty high on the inventory front:

Here’s VMD‘s interpretation of the trend:

Been on vacay in remote areas without internet..
to further Troll #103′s stats:

So far in May: 137/d vs 133 (2012) vs 160 (2011)
Apr 16-30: 127 (2013) vs 140 (2012) vs 159 (2011)
Apr 01-15: 115 (2013) vs 154 (2012) vs 147 (2011)

Look at May vs Apr sales in last few years:
2012: 2853 2011: 3377 2010: 3156 2009: 3524

The statement that “Sales are strengthening during a time that they usually begin to fall off” is incorrect. Sales almost always fall off in June (except 2009), not May.

and here’s Trolls response to that:

I don’t like using monthly numbers because they are skewed by the number of business days, one or two extra days can skew the numbers. I think a better measure is sales/day. For example you show increasing sales for 2012 from April to May, but if you break it down by sales per day, you get the following:

Apr. 1-15: 154 sales/day
Apr. 16-30: 144 sales/day
May 1-8: 133 sales/day

Falling just as I said.

So what do you think? Are we seeing enough of a trend reversal yet to say the market is strengthening or is it a normal spring bump on a long hill down?

Frances Bula has a good summary of the current state of debt on the Olympic Village.

The City of Vancouver hasn’t made it terribly easy to find out where we are in terms of paying for that mess, but with a little sleuthing it would appear we’re actually making good progress to pay off the $750 million construction loan the city took out.

Just $300 million left to pay on that debt.

Both Mr. Meggs and city manager Penny Ballem say it’s impossible to predict whether the remaining 181 condos (as of Dec. 31, 2012) and transferred Millennium properties will do more than cover the last $300-million of the outstanding debt (that figure was $462-million at the end of 2011).

If so, the remaining $171-million the city expected to get from Millennium for the land will never materialize.

So the city may never see any money for the land the Olympic Village was constructed on but hey, look at that beaver!

It’s not just Vancouver.

Across Canada the condo market is looking a little peaked.

If this is a party the keg has run dry.

Toronto and Montreal are slamming the last of the jager and slurring. Vancouver is puking in the corner.

The last time we saw Whistler they were snorting white powder on the roof and screaming they could fly.

The hang-over for this one is gonna be a bitch.

It’s evident that the condo markets in Canada’s largest cities are in the midst of some sort of correction. That final chapter on this has not yet been written.

Here’s some advice. For investors, now that the condo party appears to be over, it’s worth wondering if anyone will be left with a hangover. If history is any guide, a hard landing in the condo market tends to hit those holding the financing on condo projects first and foremost.

That’s from this Globe and Mail article by Ben Rabidoux.

If you’re flustered by the Paywall at that site and you have some time downtown in the afternoon you may be able to hear it from the author himself.

Ben is doing a talk from 4 – 5pm at Canada place today on the future of the Canadian real estate market. Free pre-registration is required and we haven’t heard if there are still tickets left, but it’s worth a try if you’re interested in this subject.

Last October a building in North Van offered a $100,000 price drop guarantee.

Yesterday a reader with the handle Not much of a name updated us on how that’s working out:

I just got an update from one of my favourite condo buildings in North Van, The Kimpton. This is the development that was offering the $100k “Price Drop Guarantee” back in October. Fast forward six months and a unit came through as a sale yesterday.

Original asking price – $750k
Listed price in Jan – $650k
Sale price – $575k

That’s $175k in six months.

If you’re looking to buy a condo these days would a ‘price drop guarantee’ soothe your worries about overpaying or would you rather just have a ‘free’ car?

Submitted by Nom

A few of you have already pointed out this article, but it’s worth a read if you haven’t seen it.

It’s a problem when Vancouver condos sell but the lights stay off

There are a number of ways you could address the problems created by a speculator driven housing market, but no move to do so yet.

Here’s one point from Sandy Garossino about the kind of units we’re building downtown:

“I think we are creating a form of housing that is perfectly suited to speculation. It couldn’t be more suited to speculation.

“They are completely interchangeable, one suite is like another suite. This is the kind of thing that drives easy trading. It’s not completely liquid, but it is a lot more liquid than say a house on a lot. So, from a policy standpoint, what we should be doing is looking at the kind of housing that speculators don’t like.

“The public policy from my perspective should be to cool that market, because it’s driving market confidence. Market confidence should match market conditions.”

Here’s a weird scene from the aftermath of the US housing bubble…

You’ve all heard of underwater mortgages, but have you ever heard of a zombie foreclosure?

There are more than 300,000 properties in the US where the owner has abandoned the property but the bank never completed a foreclosure.

What does this mean?

Reuters revealed the plight of people who walked away from their homes not realizing that their names remained on the deed and that they were financially liable for taxes and other bills related to the abandoned property.

In some cases, homeowners vacated after receiving a notice from the bank of a planned foreclosure sale, only to find out later the bank never followed through.

Zombie properties can be easy to spot as they deteriorate into neighborhood eyesores and havens for criminal activity.

Read the full article here.

Normally spring is a busy time in the real estate market.

Sales rise, prices rise.

That’s normal.

What isn’t normal is when usually optimistic Real Estate organizations and banks start predicting falling prices.

Down is the new normal.

Central 1 Credit union economist Bryan Yu says last year hit a 12 year low in sales and the coming year is predicted to be bad with continuing drops in both sales and prices:

He expects resales will fall another four per cent this year to 31,500 while the median price, the midpoint between highest and lowest, will slide six per cent to $474,000.

Yu says “subdued immigration, stagnant employment growth and the most recent round of mortgage insurance rule tightening will weigh on purchasing… biting particularly hard in high-priced Greater Vancouver.”

Full article at News 1130.

Interesting article over at the Globe and Mail…

According to adjunct UBC planning professor Andrew Yan a mind boggling 25% of condos in some areas of downtown are either vacant or occupied by non-residents.

[edited to reflect reality - the 25% is NOT vancouver wide]

This was revealed at an SFU talk wednesday night that sought to look at the issue of foreign investment in Vancouver real estate.

Picture a 20 story condo tower.

Now picture 35 of those condo towers.

That’s how many vacant units are said to be in the downtown core alone.

Mr. Yan, who specified that it’s not possible to know exactly why so many apartments were empty, said data indicate Vancouver is creating neighbourhoods that appear to be very dense, but actually don’t have an active full-time population.

That gives a skewed picture of, for example, the amount of commercial activity they can support.

In Coal Harbour, where up to one in four condos is empty in the tower-dominated waterfront neighbourhood between Stanley Park and the downtown convention centre, the scattered shops in the area often struggle to stay in business. By contrast, the West End, which has a low rate of empty residential units, is bounded by three streets – Davie, Denman, and Robson – that are packed with busy small shops and restaurants.

Mr. Yan said that the high numbers of empty apartments don’t prove there’s a problem with foreign investors, but they do indicate that Vancouver has a large proportion of general investor buyers, be they offshore or Canadian.