Canadian Chat → [Rant] Only in Vancouver

»www.theprovince.com/news ··· ory.html

or maybe Toronto,

that house would likely be about $299,000 here...tops.

There are nice a cheap locations in the cost but you have to go into the Fraser Valley. Mission is not bad and really cheap for houses and land , well for now.

Surrey is the capitol on 3 basement suite houses (so people can afford them by renting out 3/4 of the house) with 2 feet between the house and one vehicle at a time streets for $700-900K

220 to 240 here.

Around 90k in Hamilton anywhere near Barton Street.

The house was severely underpriced, deliberately, to start a bidding frenzy, which it did. The listing agent then gets tons of press for his supposed good job.

Regardless, it is absolutely insane, over 2 million dollars for a modest size house.

It would be cheaper to buy a house in the middle of nowhere and hire a limousine to take you to Vancouver every day.

How much commission does the real estate broker (listing agent) get?? Is it 6 percent?

The agent just has to sell one or two houses a year, to make a good living.

Crazy.

I grew up in that area....stayed until I was 41. The reason that house sold for that
price is the fact it's 1 block from Main Street. The Main Street corridor from 16th ave
up to about 30th ave went through a renaissance 10-15 years ago. Shops, boutique
clothing, antiques, funky restaurants, etc.

FaxCap

I keep saying this but the market is currently in the midst of a massive real-estate bubble. When the bubble bursts you can expect 20-30%+ roughly of a drop in pricing. Compound this fact with the fact that cost of living keeps increasing while wages decline/stagnate.

who are these people whose wages are stagnant and declining??...unskilled labour workers???...no one i know on a personal level (hundreds) has experienced any of this...we're all busy, incomes are increasing, including many who have switched jobs to climb the ladder.

I doubt there will be any decline in the real estate market soon in Van with the lack of vacancies...........that house here in the Okanagan would be around $300 k and our market is just rebounding.

So you want to say that the cost of living is not increasing and wages are not keeping up with the increase?

Also with the continued annual influx of 250k annual immigrants wages are suffering and with a very overcrowded labor pool.

As for those who say that the bubble won't burst the US said the same thing before their subprime crisis and look at how much housing costs there now with massive foreclosures ongoing.

said by FTTHTechie :

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So you want to say that the cost of living is not increasing and wages are not keeping up with the increase?

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no, that isn't what i typed...please go read it again.

quote:

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Also with the continued annual influx of 250k annual immigrants wages are suffering and with a very overcrowded labor pool.

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i don't disagree with you there...as long as we have a fair amount of unemployment, immigration should be shut off.

Sheesh - I thought I'd look at real estate in the same section of Van City - and there's quite a bit within 2-3 blocks for a good chunk less money than that sold for that are still nice - an example - »realtor.ca/propertyDetai ··· 15440346
It's only 1.4 million - and very nicely renovated and looks quite acceptable. I think I'd be hard pressed to choose to spend $700,000 more for the house in this article when I could use that extra $700k to buy myself a weekend house out on Vancouver Island or up in the mountains somewhere.

Bubbles are created by artificial means, example Stateside sub-prime loans compounded with no downpayment, no income, higher then asset value mortgages. People were jumping out of the mortgages before it reset itself (interest rate increase.) At first, everything was working, people could sell the overvalued property for more money, and banks kept lending with no downpayments because they could move the loans into derivatives, hide them, sell them and runaway with the cash. Totally illegal, but who went to jail? It's when the Clinton/Bush jobs sale (mostly to China) that people started to lose their jobs, that the house of cards came down.

In Vancouver, you still need to put down money. You as a buyer still need to have skin in the game. No Canadian bank is going to give you 100 % mortgage, and at mortgages over a million bucks, they want even more then the minimum amount, regardless where you buy.
The Vancouver market is overvalued, but that is partly due to overseas investing, which is usually cash, no mortgage. So a crash in value there and Toronto might be a good thing. Regular folks might be able to buy it. Will the bubble burst, not sure but if you keep saying that it will, eventually you will be right.

But it's a duplex with all the problems that come with them.

FaxCap