If the Canadian left-wing corporate media were half-awake, they’d be busy exploring the parallels between the U.S. housing market in 2008 and Canada’s today. One supposes that drawing attention to the freight train bearing down on mortgage holders would be too unwoke.
For Johnny Chen, a promotion and a substantial salary increase was not enough to help him find a home in Vancouver’s white-hot housing market, he told Fortune.
Chen, who sits at the top income bracket, told the publication he’s been scrolling through listings in the city every day for six months to no avail. Even single-family homes priced at $3 million need “substantial renovation work,” he said, making him “trigger shy.”
“It’s hard to wrap my head around prices right now. Vancouver’s real estate market is a bit crazy,” he said.
some of Johnny Chen distant relatives are the problem
My daughter bought a 1bd apt 3 years ago for 240 and sold it if yesterday for 500.
Buy lo sell hi
You can sell hi right now but you got buy your next place high if not higher also. The unknown is how much it will drop and how soon. I know people who sold in Vancouver last fall who are still looking to buy but can’t because everything is crazy stupid. They are effectively homeless millionaires. A different twist on first world problems
My house in Fort St. John is nearly 60 years old and needs a lot of interior work. B. C. Assessment figures it’s worth well over $300,000, without anybody knowing what it and the property is like.
Shortly after my father died, I hired an appraiser to look the place over and estimate how much she thought it was worth. She thought it was just under a quarter million.
Go figure.
Meanwhile, I may have a prospective buyer. He and his wife buy older houses, fix them up and refurbish them and then sell them. I showed them around when I was last in town and they’re interested in taking the place off my hands at around the appraised value. I won’t have to pay as much tax on the capital gain and the difference between that price and what BCA figures it’s worth can go into the repairs.
The fact that the Huwawei CFO owns a mansion in Vancouver should tell you all you need to know about why the Vancouver real estate market is “white hot.”
House prices and, for that matter, rents were ridiculously high when I was at UBC more than 40 years ago.
Before I moved to Vancouver, I had an 2-bedroom apartment in Calgary, close to Marlborough Town Square and I paid over $300/month. After arriving in Lotusland, I was lucky if I got anything near that. I rented a dump of a basement suite near Kitsilano for more than that. Eventually, I found accommodations in the Endowment Lands near NW Marine Drive for closer to $400.
HaH, around here ,north west of the big joke, things went from immediate sales , to only a few prospects in a week long listing. So I’m getting fewer clean outs:-))))
There’s a place in our local, with 60 acres mostly bush ( kind of a dog leg size ) , a small cabin w/o running water, septic or electricity asking $495,000.
60 or so miles east of Ottawa.
A young family just bought the house two doors down from me for 15% over an asking price that I’d never pay to live here. It’ll be a shame watching them pack in five years when the house is valued at least 25 points below principal.
Can’t wait to take it in the ass (you know we’re gonna) every which way to bail out all these folks who treated their homes like an ATM or had no business buying one in the first place.
Yeah. I’m super pumped to support all these overleraged stupid folk. I made a mistake, obviously, paying down my mortgage to 0, paying my CC bills monthly, and being debt free at 57.
Who’s the stupid one now? Seems to be me…
I’m done with Canada, working on an exit strategy, but as always, behind the ball…
A correction is long overdue. Interest rates have been suppressed by virtue signalling governments for years.
Which government wants to be responsible for mass foreclosures? So, kick the can down the road, and keep kicking it. That’s how we got here. Liberals would rather have a devalued northern peso, than raise rates to normalize them
Why would anyone live in Vancouver, British Communistland (BC)
Yep…
The Lower MAOland…
I lived there till 76, left for Calgary.
Zero regrets….EvaH.
Only thing I ever occasionally miss..??
Spanish Banks…and their fish n chips..!!
Maybe he should take the advice of the nice Chinese couple who moved next door to us. The older couple – the third asian owners in 5 years – bought this house that is listed for a mere $700k (and probably paid much more). They have no visible means of support, but I suppose they are just good with money. Like the Chinese “students” who lived there before, a young couple driving an expensive German SUV.
Who knows but there might be 50 trillion US dollars overseas. Maybe more.
So long as we printed and bought stuff, got the stuff sweat made, mined, machined, sewed AND the money stayed over seas, everything was fine.
But what happens when China, Europe,the world shitz the bed and all the rich foreigners come here bringing 2-6-10 times the yearly budget back in cash?
“A citizen of the People’s Republic of China reported average annual earnings of $40,615 to Canadian border agents yet went on to buy $32 million worth of Vancouver real estate after moving $114 million from Hong Kong-based depositors with connections to organized crime and the Chinese Communist Party, a case study by counsel for the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in B.C. shows.”
https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/investigate-tracking-a-global-dirty-money-trail-into-vancouver-real-estate-4697411
I sure hope so. I’m going short for going on two years. Finances ready…ducks in a row…..quack quack.
I told everyone I knew to spread the word to NOT take on a mortgage unless you’ve got 5 years locked in at 1%. Those poor young families with kids when rates start rising….God help them.
As much as it bothers me, the bubble isn’t going to burst any time soon. Supply cannot keep up with demand. If government really wanted it to stop, they could suspend newcomers for 2 years. Canada builds 200k homes per year and brings in 500k new people per year. Where are these people going to live? And that doesn’t account for young people looking to move out of parents home. So every year we are short supplied a few hundred thousand homes. Rising interest rates won’t fix this shortage.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling, squawk squawk.
The end is near.
Too many financial dummies and woke leftists.