Daily Vancouver Surreal Estate LOLWTF

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A house just sold for $1.172M.. OVER asking price. It sold for more than $9M.

http://blogs.theprovince.com/2016/03/04 ... ing-price/

The most expensive listing is $45M, granted it's for 4 houses, in the neighbourhood where I'm currently working on a different house: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Sing ... bia-V6J3P3

I think Chip Wilson (Lululemon founder) owns the most expensive home in Vancouver.

Absolute insanity.. very highly paid professionals cannot afford to buy a house here anymore. New record prices virtually every day. This place is getting beyond ridiculous. I sure am glad to be able to rent inexpensively at my family's house and that all the things I love about this place are free, or very inexpensive.

Lol, or should I say and now this.. people are paying $6M for a house in the far suburbs, over an hour drive away from downtown in no traffic, and then commuting to the city via private chartered helicopters.

http://www.theprovince.com/business/exe ... story.html

The new normal here is getting crazy. The kleptocrats of the world are laundering their money here. The biggest question on everyone's mind here is what's going to happen next? Do prices continue skyrocketing? Do they plateau? Or does something dramatic happen to cause a potential bubble to burst & the market crashes hard?

IMHO the whole city is becoming not only gentrified but gilded, meaning people of average means will be squeezed out to the exurbs. that makes Seattle look like a bargain in comparison, even though I could not imagine affording anything there short of winning the lotto. the cheapest rent [for a shabby efficiency flat] I found in Seattle is about $1,500 monthly.

Much of the houses/condos are vacant too. Bought up by foreigners (usually rich people from China) who never even live in them.

Yep.. the heritage house mansion renovation I'm currently working on is for a wealthy Chinese client.

There are a lot of vacant mansions in the neighbourhood. In many cases, they're purchased solely as investments.

There are neighbourhoods that are virtually ghost towns because so many of the condos are empty.

It is time that Toronto and Vancouver enact laws used in other countries to curtail the housing market inflation that is caused by foreign real estate owners. http://www.cknw.com/2015/05/12/75817/ It is one of the area of legislation that Canada continues to drag its feet over.

I wonder how much property tax those rich absentee homeowners pay?

Not enough for people of their net worth to be worried about, but enough that many seniors who bought their homes decades ago can no longer afford to pay their property taxes & so are either tapping their home equity to survive or are selling and moving away.

Real estate, right now, is a safe-harbor for investment purposes. The fact that the buyer paid more than the asking price signals that this is why the purchase was made. It also explains why most major cities have new buildings that are ghost-towns. Real estate is now just a place to park cash to some people. They don't ever intend to populate the buildings with tenants. In fact, retail office buildings that go vacant (even intentionally) can deduct rental-income as a business loss on taxes. Win-win, everybody wins (who can afford to do these schemes).

can you give me an example of what sorts of places they are moving to that are more affordable for them?

Winnipeg. The guy across the street from me came from outside the Vancouver area. He bought his house (1,250 sq.ft bungalow built in 1996) in cash for about $300,000. Expensive by Winnipeg standards but super cheap by Vancouver standards - our housing market took off about 2004 and is only now slowing down. He sold his house for nearly $1,000,000 and so yeah he had the money to buy here. He said the market was rising so fast it was time to take advantage of the equity and sell/relocate - he's financially way better off here, but a lot colder for 5 months a year.

^WOW that place is about 40 times more expensive than my place.

Smaller homes, condos, out to the suburbs, or out of town. I bet a lot of them stay within BC somewhere - just out of a detached house IN Vancouver.

The house I'm working on helping renovate/restore was bought several years ago for $4-5M. I've heard the renovation costs will exceed $11M & the final projected value of the home, property, and outbuildings, once it's finished and landscaped, will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $25M. I overheard from someone else that the renovation cost was $25M - but I think he was mistaken and the projected value of the place is $25M.

There might not be a detached single family home in Vancouver listed for under $1M anymore. $1M houses are just the starting price here.

wow I live in a tin can whose last tax assessment was around $25k. it has a third acre of land, mostly trees and brush, with the tin can shoehorned between some trees. I wonder how much something like that would cost, say, within 50 km of Vancouver or Victoria?

Depends on location, location, location. Check listings for that type of property here: http://www.realtor.ca