Vancouver Condo Info

You know how when company is coming you shove everything into closets and close the door, pretending that the mess doesn’t exist?  Well some busybodies have been opening up our closed doors instead of just enjoying the fruit punch:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Five blocks away from the venue for Vancouver’s Olympic opening ceremonies, four grizzled addicts huddle in the rain, injecting themselves with heroin behind a trash bin.

Welcome to Downtown Eastside. Here, life is gritty, volatile and the slightest misstep can invite brutal retaliation.

“It’s a jungle,” said Glen, a 49-year-old heroin addict who goes by the street name Trouble. “You want to get out of here.”

That’s from an article over at MSNBC, and it doesn’t really improve after that:

As Vancouver prepares for the Olympics and the descent of the world’s media, the Downtown Eastside remains a huge problem — 15 square blocks of despair, squalid rooming houses and alleys populated by thousands of addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug dealers who prey on them.

This neighborhood is the most concentrated drug and poverty ghetto in North America, with high use of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, according to criminologist Benedikt Fischer of Simon Fraser University. It’s also the only place in North America where drug addicts can shoot heroin into their veins at an officially sanctioned injection site.

Now why would a US news outlet want to make our city look bad?  I have a theory.  MSNBC is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC.  I suspect that Bill Gates is jealous of our property values, particularly since the Seattle market has dropped so much, and he’s pulling some strings to make us look bad.  Everyone who lives here knows you don’t go down to Main and Hastings unless you want to score some junk or catch a hot new disease, so what’s the big deal?

Well that theory explains the yanks anyways, but what’s with the British?  They’re taking their potshots too, and we’re supposed to be on the same side!  We’re part of the commonwealth!  We’ve got the queen on our currency!

Conservative estimates now speculate that the games will cost upwards of $6bn, with little chance of a return. This titanic act of fiscal malfeasance includes a security force that was originally budgeted at $175m, but has since inflated to $900m. With more than 15,000 members, it’s the largest military presence seen in western Canada since the end of the second world war, an appropriate measure only if one imagines al-Qaida are set to descend from the slopes on C2-strapped snowboards. With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland.

That’s from the Guardian article Vancouver’s Olympics are heading for disaster.  You know what I think?  I think everybody is just jealous.

Thanks to G and jjss for the links!

The Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive (VREAA) has been doing a great job of collecting anecdotes from the great Vancouver housing bubble for a while now, and many reader here will be familiar with that site.  VREAA is now running a series called Froogle Scott that follows along the experience of one local homebuyer who bought early in the run-up.

September 2003
My wife and I, first time buyers, purchase a 1940s stucco bungalow in the Grandview area of East Vancouver for the asking price of $355,000. This is about a year and a half into the current eight-year real estate boom/bubble. The lot size is 33 x 117, just slightly smaller than standard. The MLS listing gives the square footage of the house as 1860, which later turns out to be a 20% exaggeration. The house is only about 1550 square feet, split over two levels — the main floor, and a two-bedroom, ground-level rental suite. The rental suite is tenanted — a quiet single mum with stable employment and her teenaged son, who look at us with a certain amount of trepidation when we first tour the house. They needn’t worry. We’re happy to inherit good tenants, and do not increase their rent ($560 a month, plus 40% of the utilities) for the year and a half that they continue to live in the suite.
……. We avoid a bidding war because of the listing agent’s greed. She wants to sell the house to her own clients and pocket both ends of the commission (“double-ending”). So she doesn’t have an open house. And the home owners perhaps aren’t savvy enough to demand that she have one.

Read the whole first installment at the VREAA site.

There’s a strange thing happening in the Vancouver real estate market right now. Even as some rush to buy while interest rates are at rock bottom, others are trying to figure out how to get out of a presales purchase agreement they may have rushed into.

At least one local law firm is marketing themselves as condo presales litigation specialists.  Harper Grey represents clients that are being sued or fear being sued by a developer. From their site:

Harper Grey LLP represents individuals and groups of pre-sale purchasers who signed contracts for major lower mainland condo projects including:

33 Pender – Vancouver
Aria 2 – Port Moody
Aura Townhomes – Surrey
Axis – Burnaby
Cosmo – Vancouver
Donovan – Vancouver
Espana – Vancouver
Esprit 2 – Burnaby
Fairmont Pacific Rim – Vancouver
First on First – Vancouver
Fitzsimmons Walk – Whistler
Ginger – Vancouver
H & H – Vancouver
INvue – Kelowna
Mariner – Vancouver
Millennium Waters – Vancouver
Patina – Vancouver
Quattro – Surrey
Silhouette – Burnaby
Sophia – Vancouver
Tangiers Townhouses – Revelstoke
The Breeze at Airdrie – Calgary
The Exchange – Vancouver
Three Harbour Green – Vancouver
TV Towers – Vancouver
Watermark – South Surrey
Watermark Beach Resort – Osoyoos
Westwood Village Edgemont – Coquitlam
Whitetale Lane – Coquitlam
Woodwards District – Vancouver

That’s quite the list.  It’s fascinating that even with the recent rebound in the market developers are still finding it easier to sue pre-sales buyers rather than release the unit back to the market to find a new buyer.  Do we have more inventory that buyers out there?  I’m guessing no one told those rushing to buy that homes are a place to live first, a source of wealth second.

Thanks to Stanislav and Arit for pointing out the links.

This is off topic, but I’d be interested if other bloggers have been getting these odd spam messages. For the last couple of months I’ve been receiving questions like the following:

Do you pay property tax on condo california?
Before I go ahead, is there any pointers you might have?
Any help would be appreciated.  Thank you so much.  Thanks,
Tony

These questions almost make sense, but they seem to be auto-generated based on the blog topic. I’ve gotten several similar messages from the following addresses, always signed with a different name than the return address:

teronspoons@gmail.com
mike.power200@gmail.com
winstonfinancial@gmail.com
andri.manager@gmail.com
petrov.gazprom@gmail.com
iris.accountants@gmail.com

Now normally spam is trying to get you to buy something or visit a website. The odd thing about these is they seem to just want answers to questions. What could be the motivation for this?

My theory is that they’re looking for unique content from bloggers to put on a website. Scrapers generally just steal material from existing websites and republish it, but search engines will penalize duplicate content. This would be a way for them to harvest unique content that hasn’t been published before, so it wouldn’t suffer the same search penalty. If that is what they’re up to its kind of clever actually – get people that are interested in a topic to answer general questions about it.

One way to check this theory is to reply to them with with somewhat reasonable nonsense, and then do a web search on your reply a month or so later to see if it shows up online.

The following question made such little sense, I couldn’t help but reply with a helpful answer:

How much cost water for a condo in canada?
Your insight into what would be the best way to proceed would be much appreciated.
Any help appreciated.  Thank you in advance.  yours truly, Tim

Hi Tim,

Condos with running water are the latest trend in Canada and have recently grown in popularity.  Water can increase the value of a condo tremendously.  In the Major cities (Vancouver, Montreal, Moosejaw) running water is highly prized and can lead to bidding wars on a property, even when mixed with a small amount of urine.  If both hot and cold running water are available in a residence (particularly if delivered via pipes), the sky’s the limit.  Expect to pay at least $140,000 pgm (Per Gallon Per Minute).

Thanks for writing, I hope this helps!
-T

Regular readers will recognize the name Paul Boenisch as the North Vancouver realtor who provided daily market stats on his blog.  As many of you know, Paul and his family moved to to the other coast recently, and he now has a new blog focusing on the Prince Edward Island real estate market.

It’s an interesting contrast to our market- check out the average sales price chart he’s posted that covers the last four years.  They started 2006 with an average residential sales price of $120k, and peaked just above $160k.

I don’t know if the real estate market in Vancouver has ever only declined for one year, particularly at the beginning of a global recession, and I know what most of you think about that question anyways, so I won’t ask if you think we’ve hit the bottom of the real estate correction..

I am however seeing encouraging signs that we’ve hit bottom of the bursting real estate bubble blog bubble though, despite the disappointing news yesterday of Condohypes closure.  We originally called this bubble at the beginning of 2007, and at the start of this year we reported on the apparent bursting of the bubble blog bubble.  Now however, we get news that Fish is back.  That link has been updated on the links to the right, along with a belated correction of the link to Housing Analysis.

Is this just a spring bounce or the return of the Vancouver bubble blog bubble? Either way we’re always like to see new independent sources of information and opinion on the Vancouver real estate market, even if they’re old sources.

So when you change your mind Condohype, we’ll be happy to welcome you back.

Local Realtor Paul Boenische has been providing daily statistics for the lower mainland market since the end of 2007. In 2008 he won the Georgia Straights reader choice award for “Best Realtor”.  Many of you have read his blog and seen his comments on other sites (like this one) under the name PaulB, so it is sad to see that he is leaving Vancouver for the improved quality of life in PEI.

We initially were interested in Charlottetown because we have some family there, and after researching it and visiting PEI, the vastly improved quality of life is what convinced us. Sandra and I want to have the time to be very involved in the lives of our children, and PEI is affordable as well as being beautiful.

I will miss the opportunity to work with many of you. I always got a kick out of meeting the person behind the avatar. However, I look forward to selling real estate in a market where I can more easily see value for the dollar. Selling first-time home buyers into a 200k house will feel good compared to the recent speculative mania that has infested BC real estate. And when you toss in beautiful beaches and the best golf in Canada it all made a tough decision a little easier.

You can read the rest of his farewell message on his blog.

I skipped town during the ‘Best of Vancouver’ awards party, so I never got to meet you Paul.  Best of luck with your move, I hope that you will keep us updated on how you and your family are enjoying your new home.

Keith sent in a notice that CondoAdvisory.com is online and seeking reviews of condo units – the site looks like it’s got a lot of promise and if widely used could become a useful community resource for condo buyers and renters.  I like the tag line too: “Take the ummm…out of condominiummmm…”

Here’s their Vancouver Condo reviews page, they’ve started adding video of many units, and like any self-respecting real estate site they also have a blog.

You’ve seen them all over Vancouver, from green mesh covered buildings in fairview to plastic shrouded condo towers downtown.  But what’s it like to actually live in leaky condo thats being repaired?

A renter in Yaletown has started blogging about life in the green mesh: The Leaky Condo Chronicles is an interesting read about the inconvenience and frustration of living in an active repair zone:

Buzzing, vibrating, grinding noise jolted me awake at 8 AM. It’s really too bad that earplugs can’t block out the vibrations — they’re worse than the noise…

I think today is worse than ever before. They’re grinding down the concrete of the balcony right next door to us.

Mondays tend to be particularly bad anyway, probably because weekends are so nice and quiet, but I do think it’s true — it can’t get any worse than this — can it? Can it?

I need to run away.

You can find more misery at leakycondolife.blogspot.com

With more and more noise in the media about Vancouver real estate being overpriced you may be surprised to find a local real estate investment that appears quite inexpensive by comparison – The Timeshare.  Vlad writes in to share his experience:

I’ve made a costly mistake – I bought a timeshare from Point To Point Destinations (PTP Destinations, West Coast Timeshare) in Vancouver, BC and I regret it ever since.  Check the facts before you buy a timeshare from any company to avoid making the same mistake I did.
I posted my experience and facts on this web site: TimeshareRevealed.com  Please go to the “Investment Calculator” page, it is more than just a calculator. There I share facts about the following:

•    Real cost of timeshare comparing to an investment.
•    Examples from eBay about resell value.
•    How it can be cheaper to buy for cash.
•    Maintenance fees of a timeshare comparing to a condo.
•    Transaction and other fees.
•    Assets value of the company comparing to the cost of the shares.
•    Using points for car rentals, cruises, airline tickets, entertainment and so on.
•    Limitations of  booking timeframe.
•    Unused points taken away while maintenance fees not refunded.
•    Deed and title.
•    Using RCI membership for home resorts.
•    Collections practices.
•    The right of first refusal.
•    How much of your money paid to sales representatives.
•    PROFIT 100 guide compared to audited financial statements.
•    Lack of warranties or guarantees.

I wish someone explained this to me before I bought my timeshare from Point To Point Destinations (PTP Destinations, West Coast Timeshare) in Vancouver, BC. During sales presentation I understood some of it much differently and I do not remember other important things mentioned at all. If I knew all this I would never buy it to begin with. I hope these facts will help you make your own decision.

Vlads website is at www.TimeshareRevealed.com