Vancouver Condo Info

Plans to build a 20 story tower in the west end met some resistance yesterday, as local residents held a protest against the proposal.

The rezoning would allow developers to build a 20-storey tower on the site and take advantage of the city’s Short Term Incentives for Rental Housing (STIR) program, which includes incentives such as faster permitting process, parking requirement reductions and increased density of the rental apartments.

“It’s completely out of sync with what works in the neighbourhood,” said Godfrey Tait, a spokesman for the concerned residents. “You could maybe have some mixed-market, family-oriented housing, maybe something that wouldn’t exceed six levels, but certainly not another tower.”

The full article is in the Vancouver Sun.

This fixer-upper is conveniently located near the center of Vancouver BC host city of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic games.  Just minutes from downtown, it can be yours for only $579,900.  You may be slightly put off by the pictures, but remember, many investors won’t be able to recognize a diamond in the rough, so you might not have to bid too much over asking price to put this baby in your portfolio of investment properties.

First time buyers, Investors, Builders. Corner lot with lane. Nice residential street. Close to everything. Central location. Handy man special. Needs TLC. Mainly Land Value. 21st Avenue and Prince Albert St. 10 mins to Downtown Vancover.

Thanks to crash and tincup for finding this gem!

Now that the W has revitalized the Downtown Eastside, eliminating the scourge of homeless, drug addicts, panhandlers and prostitutes there’s just one more bold step to complete this neighborhoods transformation: 270 sq foot micro condos.

For those keeping track, that’s the size of two parking spots.  You can tell your grandkids about the good ol’ days when your family lived in a spacious 450sq foot condo.

John Stovell, general manager of Reliance Properties, said there’s a strong need for more affordable rental units in the downtown area.

“So many people contact us, not with a specific size they want, or specific amenities, but they tell us where they want to be in the neighbourhood and how much they can pay. So often that amount is just not achievable for anything but a very specialized product like this,” he said.

“By cutting away the non-essentials, that is the only way to get to that price-point in Vancouver,” he said.

This article is a few days old, but still interesting and worth discussing.  It seems that if you haven’t rented out your home or condo yet for the winter games, you may be facing a lot of competition and have to ramp down your expectations of getting rich off the games.

Metro Vancouver homeowners desperate to rent their properties to Olympic Games visitors have scaled back their golden expectations.

An abundance of Games-time accommodation rental options has forced asking prices down and increased the likelihood that many properties won’t attract any Olympic renters.

“Don’t base your food budget on the prospect of renting your home,” said Mark Szekely, site administrator for listing service rent2010.net. “It’s still a realistic possibility but if you’re outside downtown Vancouver or Whistler, you might not find a renter. It’s an oversupplied market.”

Anyone out there subletting their owned or rented house or apartment for the games (or trying to)?

Higher interest rates are coming.  You don’t even need to hear government spokespeople or bank economists say that to know it’s true.  With mortgage rates at record lows there’s really only one direction for them to go.  The question is how much longer they can be held down, and how quickly they will rise.

The C.D. Howe institute is the latest to raise alarms about the housing bubble risk created by record low interest rates:

The Ottawa-based public policy think-tank says many economists, including its own, are predicting rate hikes as much as a full percentage point or more later next year.

“Does the simple experience of short-term interest rates being so low, for so long, encourage people … to mortgage themselves more than they otherwise would, and buy a bigger house than they otherwise would … and get themselves into trouble longer term?” said C.D. Howe president and CEO William Robson.

On Tuesday, the Bank of Canada announced it would keep its key overnight rate at the historic low of 0.25 per cent. The C.D. Howe Institute says that is helping to create a false sense of security among borrowers who have taken on debts larger than they could normally afford.

Robson said a rapid rise in interest rates could prove devastating for homeowners who have not evaluated their ability to carry their mortgages at a higher interest rate.

Information on how many recent buyers could handle higher rates has been hard to come by, but when rates start to rise from their current record lows it will quickly become apparent if the recent mini-boom was driven by cheap credit.  Rising mortgage rates squeeze both ends: supply and demand.  Those that haven’t planned on payments at normal rates may find they need to sell just when there are fewer buyers due to increased carrying costs.

RP posted a link to this story in the Globe and Mail about the collapse of the Canadian subprime market.  Borrowers with bad credit or no income who were unable to obtain a CMHC insured mortgage over the last half decade had another option: lenders like Xceed Mortgage Corp used money from the securitization market to lend bubble-buyers money at very high interest rates with extra fees.  The problem now is that when the credit bubble burst it killed demand for these kind of risky investments.  Now even buyers who have paid all their mortgage bills on time are finding that their mortgages will not be renewed, and the terms of their agreement means they often now owe the lender more money than their house is worth and more than they originally borrowed:

Far away from the push and pull in Ottawa, Ms. Matthews has put her house up for sale. A handful of prospective buyers has wandered through, but she has received no offers. A few weeks ago, she received a letter from Xceed’s lawyers, explaining that she owes the company nearly $128,000. This means that, despite paying Xceed about $40,000 over the past three years, she now owes $1,000 more than she originally borrowed.

A ‘lobby group’ for these buyers is now petitioning the Canadian Government for a special $1 billion bail out fund for these buyers, but the lenders will not provide any specific information or statistics to the Finance Department.

“We’re not talking about a scoundrel that brought it upon himself. … These are people that didn’t do anything wrong,” said Joel Katz, a Windsor mortgage broker. Mr. Katz said he believes the issue isn’t on the government’s radar because this type of lending accounted for such a small segment of the market compared with the United States. “The problem wasn’t as big here, and there are people who are getting stepped on and overlooked.”

But exactly how many people are being “stepped on?” Public records in Canada are so scarce, it’s impossible – even for lawmakers – to know for sure. Ottawa relies on Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. for data, but because none of these subprime players insured their mortgages through CMHC, the public agency knows very little about their state of their books. One source close to the Finance Department said officials at the Crown corporation figure that stranded borrowers account for only “a tiny sliver” of the country’s homeowners.

Paul McGill, president of mortgage provider N-Brook and spokesman for the mortgage lenders lobby, argues Ottawa is understating the problem. He said he has supplied federal officials with data showing that $1.7-billion of healthy mortgages could be stranded and that these borrowers lack high enough credit scores to qualify for loans from more conservative lenders.

City council unanimously endorsed a plan Tuesday night to create a high-density, mixed-use neighbourhood of about 7,000 people around BC Place Stadium and GM Place on the final undeveloped section of the former Expo lands.

http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=99d209cf-02b9-4a4f-aca4-4abc8f7fb86a

The controversial concept includes a new civic plaza plus four million square feet of residential space and 1.8 million square feet of office space.

What it doesn’t include is the 2.75 acres of park space per 1,000 people that city council holds as a goal.

So less parkland, but parks are green right, and city council wants Vancouver to be the “greenest city” right?  …few parks in this development sadly.

As proposed, densities in northeast False Creek will be among the highest in the downtown peninsula, the report said, noting the high-density push is being driven by the city’s goal of becoming the greenest city in the world by 2020.

Will this be a success?  Will it result in a Vancouver’s first ghetto thus making us truly an international city complete with concrete all rental ghetto?

Patriotz posted a link to this article in the Globe and Mail about proposed Laneway housing for Vancouver.

The laneway house: A novel solution to Vancouver’s real-estate crunch

As he points out:

Note bogus headline. Is there a RE “crunch” in Vancouver? Of course not. Rents are falling.

Read the article and you will find that cash-strapped homeowners are planning to build laneway houses to recharge their finances. Running out of land? Nope. Pent-up supply? Yep.

Build baby build.

From the article:

Homeowners who can’t afford to pay their mortgages, parents who want to give their struggling children a place to live, and recession-strapped boomer retirees who want to lower their costs by moving into their own backyards showed up to make the argument that this is a great option for Vancouver.

Builder Jake Fry, whose company Smallworks has been gearing up to build the laneway houses, said he’s getting calls from families like the Woodmans “who are just finding it hard to get by, so they want to downsize and move in with the kids.”

Some residents, including Linda MacAdam, were adamantly opposed during last week’s public hearings. She complained bitterly that the “Vancouver we know and love now will no longer exist” once 65,000 homeowners potentially get the right to add another small house to their yards.

So what do you think about laneway housing?  Will this be a good or bad thing for the city and why?

Several people pointed out this story – it appears that businesses are leaking out of the downtown core pushing metro office vacancy rates up to 7.4% from the 5.4% they started the year at.

..Avison Young expects that rate to rise as a result of further office closures that have been announced, but where tenants have yet to leave.

Online auction firm eBay, which announced it is closing its Burnaby operations, is one example of still-occupied space that will become available.

“I don’t know that we’ve felt the full impact of that [space] becoming available yet,” Darrell Hurst, principal of Avison Young’s Vancouver office, said in an interview. “There is still more to come.”

Hurst said the downturn has hit Metro Vancouver businesses across the board, including financial services, the resource sector and other service businesses. But he said there are longer-term signs of life. More prospective tenants are starting to view available space compared to earlier in the year, and some firms are committing to taking significant blocks of space in 2010 and beyond.

“So we’re reasonably optimistic for the latter half of 2010,” Hurst said, “and we may be pleasantly surprised by [the second quarter] of 2010.”

Avison Young broker Matthew Craig said that downtown, office tenants had vacated 487,775 square feet (45,315 square metres more office space than they leased in the first half of 2009, which is “roughly equivalent to the size of a new office tower.”

Full article in the Vancouver Sun.

Little posted a link to this Province newspaper story over the weekend. Subcontractors at the Vancouver Olympic Village are accused of taking shortcuts in its construction, including not insulating all in wall pipes.  This brings a risk of mould problems 3 or 4 years down the road:

During the meeting, Loftus says, Jasper was shown photos of the uninsulated pipes in various buildings on the site and said he would get back to the insulators union, but Loftus said he’s still waiting. A second visit to the site weeks after the meeting found the drywall still in place with the pipes now hidden behind it.

“I don’t think they can fix it on time,” Loftus said. “They would have to take the walls down, inspect all the piping and then do it right. It would certainly be cheaper to do it now rather than later, but I’m guessing it would cost millions.

“And if they found mould, it would be even worse.”

Ballem said she wasn’t told about any specific problems with the construction of the Olympic Village, only that a union had some concerns about quality control.

“This is the first I’ve heard of this,” Ballem said when contacted by The Province. “If the concerns are true — and I have no evidence of whether they are or not — and they not being paid attention to, that’s a concern for the city.”