Vancouver Condo Info

There are a huge number of houses and condominiums for sale in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland with fewer and fewer buyers who have the desire and/or ability to buy.  Recently we got the alarming news that in the first 12 days of November not a single west side Vancouver house was sold out of 968 listing. 

So how can you make your house, townhome or condo stand out from the crowd and snag a buyer that still has access to credit?

There’s a saying: you can’t make money without spending money. So with that in mind we offer the following tips to increase foot traffic at your open house and sell your Vancouver property in a falling market:

1. Paint your roof gold.  This will really make your house stand out amongst your neighbors, particularly if you use real gold-leaf, not that cheap fake gold stuff.

2. Hire underwear models. Want foot traffic at your open house? Hire a few underwear models to lounge around the yard and entry way.

3. Offer free beer and weed. Or if you want to be family-friendly coffee and cookies, etc, but the underwear models will prefer the beer and weed.

If these techniques don’t work for you, the market may have gotten worse.  In that case you have two options that may still work as a last resort:

A. Pray to the money god for a buyer with great credit and a lousy eye for value
or
B. Lower your price.

Hey, it just might work!

2008 - Vancouver House Prices Down almost 10% from the peak.

According to statistics released by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the benchmark price for a single family home in Metro Vancouver is down 9.8% from the May 2008 price peak and down 4.7% from the October 2007 price so far.  From an article in the Vancouver Sun.

Greater Vancouver saw MLS sales of 1,364 units in October compared with 3,028 in the same month a year ago.

Single-family home sales across the region dropped to 493 units in October from 1,368 in October, 2007. Condominium sales were also down substantially to 493 units from 1,133 in the same month a year ago.

Dave Watt, the Greater Vancouver board’s president, said sales are not keeping pace with B.C.’s current economic conditions with low unemployment and stable interest rates.

“That’s a direct result of a loss of consumer confidence in the overall market,” Watt said.

In the Fraser Valley, the detached house price hit $513,892 in October, down 6.5 per cent from May and 0.6 per cent below the average price of October, 2007.

MLS sales of 768 in the valley were 48 per cent below sales levels of the same month a year ago.

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.

Thanks to Vansanity for this tip - apparently all excavation work has stopped on the Residences at Ritz-Carlton site on West Georgia street in downtown Vancouver.  Word is that everyone was told to stop work and leave the site on Friday Oct. 17th, leaving the excavation about 60% finished.  All signage advertising the Residences at Ritz-Carlton have been removed from the site scaffolding and all construction trailers have been removed.  I couldn’t find a text story link confirming this information, but I did find this CBC news video report on the situation.

According to that report the developer is saying that this is not due to any credit market problems (as we’ve seen in a number of other lower mainland condo developments).  The developer says that although sales have been slow, financing is in place and there are enough presales to move ahead with the construction.  The developer is saying that they are going to be doing some ‘modifications to the design’ and that there’s no point in having work going ahead, or having the presentation sales center open until those modifications are done.  At this point there’s no indication as to when work may continue, but we’ll keep an eye out for developments on this story.

It looks like all is not going according to plan in Surrey’s efforts to turn Whalley, a neighbourhood known for its crack dealers and methamphetamine users, into a new Yaletown.  There was the massive fire that destroyed phase 2 of the Quattro development and then there was last weeks story about money trouble at Infinity, the largest housing project ever built in Surrey.

Surrey Mayor Diane Watts and Quattro developments principle Charan Sethi held a meeting with buyers this weekend to update them on the current situation.  The uncertainly and delays in completing these large projects comes at a time when house and condo prices are declining adding more stress to buyers, some of whom are trying to get out of their presales contracts.

But Sethi disappointed buyers who hoped the development company would buy units back from investors who wanted out. He said that wasn’t an option.  And he was unable to provide buyers with a solid timeline on move-in dates.

“We are desperate. We are homeless,” said buyer Carol Lobo, in an emotional confrontation with Sethi. “When can we move in?”

“Trust me,” said a smiling Sethi. “Give us another 10 days and we’ll have a better idea.”  The answer wasn’t good enough for Lobo, who came to the meeting with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. “We don’t have anywhere to go.”

Lobo was looking for other answers as well. “What about damage from the water, will the condo be toxic? What about another fire, and security?”

Concerns about further delays or cancellation of these project is being dismissed by the developer and financial backers.

Greg Sprung, senior vice-president and regional general manager for Canadian Western Bank, reiterated the bank’s commitment to work with the developer. “We’ve been with the project from the beginning and we intend to stay with it until the end.”

However when The Vancouver Sun asked what might happen if future buyers lose confidence in the development, or in the face of continued declines in the real estate market, he was less reassuring.

“That’s something we would have to deal with at the time. We approve phase by phase. Projects do get put on hold due to market slowdowns. I don’t know anyone that would build something for which there is no demand.”

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…)

Want to make your lawn look lush and green all year round?

A Stockton man sees the growing number of dead brown lawns of foreclosed homes in the area and sees nothing but green.

Nick Terlouw has launched the Greener Grass Co., which amounts to a service in which he sprays dead lawns with a deep green, water-based dye that makes the turf look good enough for a golf course or a professional football stadium.

For between $175 and $225 per yard, Terlouw uses a motor-powered 50-gallon insecticide sprayer designed for treating orchard trees. He waves his magic wand and in broad sweeps, a la painting a house, makes tired, if not expired, turf sit up and sparkle like Shirley Temple.

Full article here.