Real Estate discussions

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Changing City

...
The mayor never called Andy Yan xenophobic - is that projection? He was concerned that the discussion of Andy's study had 'racist tones'. He specifically said "more needed to be done to address housing affordability than pitting people against each other.

"This can't be about race, it can't be about dividing people," said Robertson. "It needs to get to the core issue about addressing affordability and making sure it's fair."

Looks like the racist tones still prevail over a decade later.

You say tomato I say tomato. It's clear Robertson's intent was to stifle debate by cloaking his intent in some kumbaya language.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by whatnext

You say tomato I say tomato. It's clear Robertson's intent was to stifle debate by cloaking his intent in some kumbaya language.

I disagree. As he said quite clearly, Robertson was concerned that the discussion about improving affordability would degenerate into one with a racist tone. As you have ably proved, it did. Unsurprisingly, now that Canada has some of the most stringent anti foreign ownership rules in the western world, you still seem intent on fixating on that one aspect of the many factors that are usually understood to have contributed to the relative unaffordability of new housing for potential buyers in many parts of Canada, and particularly in Vancouver and Toronto.

[GMD]

Originally Posted by Changing City

That's possible, I guess, but his math is still off. The number of households has tripled, but the population increased from 1m to 2.6m, so x2.6. Given the same demographic forces in society (more single person families everywhere), that's not surprising, and not a big deal.

And if he means Greater Vancouver, he shouldn't say 'city of Vancouver'.

I could be wrong, but if I remember right, he is actually referring to the downtown area of Vancouver only. Seem to remember I called him on his 'tripling' being bs and he blocked me, but that was some years back.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by GMD

I could be wrong, but if I remember right, he is actually referring to the downtown area of Vancouver only. Seem to remember I called him on his 'tripling' being bs and he blocked me, but that was some years back.

Who knows what he thinks he's referencing, but that would be wrong too!

If it's the population and dwellings in the entire peninsula, they both almost exactly tripled over 50 years, from 44,000 people to 117,000, and from 24,000 dwellings to almost 70,000.

If it's just the Downtown local area (without the West End) that went from just under 7,000 people to just under 70,000, and from 1,380 dwellings to nearly 40,000.

[GMD]

Originally Posted by Changing City

Who knows what he thinks he's referencing, but that would be wrong too!

If it's the population and dwellings in the entire peninsula, they both almost exactly tripled over 50 years, from 44,000 people to 117,000, and from 24,000 dwellings to almost 70,000.

If it's just the Downtown local area (without the West End) that went from just under 7,000 people to just under 70,000, and from 1,380 dwellings to nearly 40,000.

At any rate, if people want to understand the flaws in Condon's arguments, and how the housing market works more generally, this is a good read (it also references Condon referring to a tripling of housing in the 'city center')

TLDR: The best way to bring down prices is to allow more housing to get built .

[whatnext]

From BIV this week. Hard to see much new condo product being poposed in the near future:

Bryan Yu: Buyer's market tightens its grip on Metro Vancouver
Weak sales, flat pricing and elevated inventory underscore hurting market activity
Bryan Yu
a day ago

B.C.’s Lower Mainland housing market wrapped up a dismal year for the sector with another tepid performance in December. Local real estate board data showed an 11.5 per cent drop in home sales in the region spanning Metro Vancouver through the Fraser Valley to 2,378 units. Seasonally adjusted sales fell 4.3 per cent from the prior month. Same-month sales were lowest since 2023, and nearly 20 per cent below the 10-year average for the month. The average price fell 6.3 per cent year over year to $1.127 million, with seasonally adjusted values down 2.4 per cent month over month. Average price levels have largely been range-bound since 2023, and 13 per cent below the early 2022 peak.

On a full-year basis, regional home sales fell 12.5 per cent for the year to 35,350 units, marking the lowest level since 2000, while the average price declined 3.4 per cent to $1.165 million. The lack of volume is particularly dismal when compared to growth in the population base...

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/brya...ens-its-grip-on-metro-vancouver-11741955

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by whatnext

From BIV this week. Hard to see much new condo product being poposed in the near future:

Bryan Yu: Buyer's market tightens its grip on Metro Vancouver
Weak sales, flat pricing and elevated inventory underscore hurting market activity
Bryan Yu
a day ago

B.C.’s Lower Mainland housing market wrapped up a dismal year for the sector with another tepid performance in December. Local real estate board data showed an 11.5 per cent drop in home sales in the region spanning Metro Vancouver through the Fraser Valley to 2,378 units. Seasonally adjusted sales fell 4.3 per cent from the prior month. Same-month sales were lowest since 2023, and nearly 20 per cent below the 10-year average for the month. The average price fell 6.3 per cent year over year to $1.127 million, with seasonally adjusted values down 2.4 per cent month over month. Average price levels have largely been range-bound since 2023, and 13 per cent below the early 2022 peak.

On a full-year basis, regional home sales fell 12.5 per cent for the year to 35,350 units, marking the lowest level since 2000, while the average price declined 3.4 per cent to $1.165 million. The lack of volume is particularly dismal when compared to growth in the population base...

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/brya...ens-its-grip-on-metro-vancouver-11741955

So far new development continues to add ownership units. CMHC data shows there were 17,555 market starts in 2025 in Metro Vancouver, only 400 less than in 2024 and almost exactly the same as the 20 year average (17,631). Rental starts were down a bit, from 10,316 to 9,630, although that's still double the 20 year average.

You may be correct that there won't be enough new projects able to launch successfully to maintain that rate of development in the near future.

[jollyburger]

How Patrick Condon plans to resurrect a healthy real estate market in Vancouver.

Yet the crisis could also serve as catalyst. The pain of falling values exposes deep structural flaws: an economy overly dependent on real estate as wealth creation, families priced out of neighbourhoods, and urban forms that prioritize profit over people and planet.

Drawing from principles of land economics, sustainable design and equitable urbanism — ideas I’ve explored in works like Broken City and Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities — here are seven rules suggested to help us navigate this downturn and emerge with a more just, resilient and equitable Vancouver.

I mean anyone can debate how to "fix" the system but is he so tone deaf that he knows to scream "I'm a former urban planner" in his "rules".

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/01/12/Vancouver-Real-Estate-Drop-Chance-Reset/

[mcj]

Originally Posted by jollyburger

How Patrick Condon plans to resurrect a healthy real estate market in Vancouver.

I mean anyone can debate how to "fix" the system but is he so tone deaf that he knows to scream "I'm a former urban planner" in his "rules".

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/01/12/Vancouver-Real-Estate-Drop-Chance-Reset/

Many of his assessments are halfway there, but ultimately have huge flaws.

Diversify the economy? Yeah sounds great, we should absolutely do that, but there's zero ideas actually being offered by this guy.

Support families with non-market housing? Yeah also sounds great. We're currently seeing more investment in this than we have for a while, ensuring that investment is stable and growing is a good thing. The proposed solution is a land tax, i.e. raising property taxes for this, but only on the big bad developers and not on legacy homeowners like him who spent their entire lives under contributing.

Shift from high rises to 6-storey buildings? OneCity pushed legalizing 6-storey blocks everywhere in the last election, and Patrick Condon's TEAM opposed that. If you're serious about doing this we'd end up seeing construction of 6-storey buildings significantly more wide spread to cover the loss of high rise density. We can't build ourselves into Europe without doing exactly what is happening with high rise displacement, but it would end up being on a massively larger scale. Again, something TEAM opposes with their criticism of the Broadway Plan.

Find cheaper and better alternatives to subways? Sure, that's surface or elevated rail. Buses, LRTs and pedestrian/cycling infrastructure are all great, but they're for entirely different use cases than a subway, and transport substantially less people with much slower speed. We should be building bus lanes (already proposed by Translink) and building out pedestrian cycling infrastructure (fund the city's existing transportation plans for this), but doing so instead of subway/Skytrain construction shows how little understanding he has of transportation planning.

The three remaining points are all just wishful thinking that are predicated on the points already proposed.

This guy was clearly once right about things but now is just out of touch.

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by mcj

Many of his assessments are halfway there, but ultimately have huge flaws.

Diversify the economy? Yeah sounds great, we should absolutely do that, but there's zero ideas actually being offered by this guy.

People have been saying that since the first tree was chopped down in BC.

[Migrant_Coconut]

And which sector? Culture's almost nonexistent, tech isn't growing, mass media's in a slump, datacentres are more trouble than they're worth, factories can't afford the real estate, retail and services can't make up the difference by themselves, and I suspect Condon would hate more O&G. Pretty much the only thing Vancouver can diversify into at the moment is tourism and the ports, and we're already doing both.

[jollyburger]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

And which sector? Culture's almost nonexistent, tech isn't growing, mass media's in a slump, datacentres are more trouble than they're worth, factories can't afford the real estate, retail and services can't make up the difference by themselves, and I suspect Condon would hate more O&G. Pretty much the only thing Vancouver can diversify into at the moment is tourism and the ports, and we're already doing both.

2020: Time for BC and Vancouver to Stop Glorifying Global Tech Jobs

A better path? Start by changing our conventional way of measuring economic growth, they say. Present models favour market consumption and global investment of all kinds. This bias undercuts the importance of “foundational activities.” Those include sectors that provide universal services (water, sewer, energy, health care, education, etc.) that are tied tightly to local populations and not “vagrants” like high-tech. The types of people employed are nurses, hairdressers, waiters, public works employees, yoga teachers, bus drivers, food service workers, carpenters, etc.

Algorithm programmers equipped with quantum computers may be cool. But the arrival of the plague has shown us that the guy who stocks the grocery shelves is ten times more important, and having our own supplies of the basics, like paper surgical masks, should be a priority.

More than 90 per cent of current employment here is in the foundational economy, and that whatever success we achieve in attracting high tech and bio-tech will have limited benefit and large potential harm.

Our local economy is nearly self-supporting.

Current and future jobs largely will be focused on providing necessary local services on the one hand and public utilities (education, health care, public safety, utility infrastructure) on the other.

We might expand our sense of what constitutes infrastructure to include housing (our biggest current problem to be sure), as do other advanced democracies.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/06/11/Stop-Glorifying-Tech-Jobs-Vancouver/

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by jollyburger

2020: Time for BC and Vancouver to Stop Glorifying Global Tech Jobs

Hmm. So no tech, no real estate, no resource extraction, no high density, no SkyTrain. All the non-market homes he wants will be paid for by doubling down on the service sector and biking to work.

... Is he secretly a hobbit?

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

Hmm. So no tech, no real estate, no resource extraction, no high density, no SkyTrain. All the non-market homes he wants will be paid for by doubling down on the service sector and biking to work.

... Is he secretly a hobbit?

People who haven't had a real job in decades or ever don't understand the modern workforce. Not really that surprising.

Why he keeps getting so much air and print time is puzzling.

[GenWhy?]

"For example, Toronto’s urban futurist Richard Florida, who in 2002 became famous for his book The Rise of the Creative Class, touting the power of young tech entrepreneurs to power up a local economy, reversed course. In 2017 he published a second book, The New Urban Crisis, saying that unfortunately his “creative class” was actually supercharging inequality in globally-attractive cities — driving a big income wedge between high-tech workers and their Uber drivers and baristas."

I'm quite frustrated with this read so I wrote way too much...

Well that's interesting to read today as I just listened to Florida on a podcast (released in 2021) talking about the "creative class" as the driving factor for strong tier-2 cities and the power of remote work where people no longer need to work in big cities.

In the 2017 podcast on is "New Urban Crisis" book, he mentions underpredicting the urban revival and cities inability to react to that success, and the book was to tell cities to acknowledge it's a real event and to invest in things for people and not "casinos and stadiums". He said he was optimistic that small cities would take the weight off big cities.

He cites Rob Ford as a crux to the "backlash" of the urban revival to start into his 2017 book. He also mentions that gentrification isn't a direct displacement, the problem he does mention is housing prices and how that pushes this group around an urban metro - what he mentions as "economic segregation" where areas with the most... everything for economic progress of our urban capitalistic society is a danger to itself. The success of cities and the drivers of that economic growth are also hurting cities.

He didn't "reverse course", he did some research of what happened / was happening and wrote a book on it. He speaks to helping the service jobs for better minimum wages and education and supports (internal career ladder, unions, etc).

Condon also intertwines the "creative class" and the capital coming here buying housing. To him they're the same, or as I read it in his opinion piece.

He calls the Broadway Plan area the "innovation corridor" from Commercial Drive to UBC and a catalyst is the subway "running under Pacific Spirit Park"?

"Finally, be extremely careful about unbalancing our infrastructure expenditures in the misguided belief that highly expensive infrastructure (e.g. subways to UBC) will serve the common good by catalyzing global economic development investment. The evidence seems to indicate the opposite. Such projects accelerate wealth and class divides and favour the wooed newcomers, rather than enhance the health, safety and welfare of our current citizens."

I thought we were building a subway because the 99 is over crowded?

I'd recommend listening to Florida's words directly in his Strong Town interviews instead of getting an interpretation from Condon, who crafts Florida's words to support his own perspective.

[Migrant_Coconut]

That said, interesting that STEM is labelled under the "creative" class (science and arts often repel each other), but okay... and it's hard to call it the "driving" force when film/TV/game/etc developers are being laid off left and right and replaced with clankers.

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

"Finally, be extremely careful about unbalancing our infrastructure expenditures in the misguided belief that highly expensive infrastructure (e.g. subways to UBC) will serve the common good by catalyzing global economic development investment. The evidence seems to indicate the opposite. Such projects accelerate wealth and class divides and favour the wooed newcomers, rather than enhance the health, safety and welfare of our current citizens."

I thought we were building a subway because the 99 is over crowded?

We are. But Condon's Point Grey Karens already ignore transit overcrowding and deny the housing crisis, so what's changed there?

On the other hand, the idea that in their minds, they're small-town have-nots fighting a crusade to protect Vancouver against big bad globalists does explain a lot of things about them.

On the third hand, how the hell do buses and streetcars "balance" infrastructure? Putting one each on 4th, Broadway and 16th just means you have a somewhat-used line, an overcrowded line, and a near-empty line. He keeps confusing cause and effect.

[whatnext]

Perhaps this is the “creative class” Richard Florida had in mind?

The saga of two Beijing Opera workers who transferred almost $60 million into Metro Vancouver real estate

….Tong (Tony) Zhang Jr. was in charge of stage layout and props. His romantic partner, Danyang Yang, was an opera singer.

Their positions at the opera were only their day jobs, however. During the 2010s, the couple were also busy in Beijing’s ultra-hot real estate market.

In a lawsuit that pits Zhang’s family against the Yin family, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gordon Funt described how the opera employees, neither of whom “enjoyed exceptional remuneration,” eventually moved $45 million to $60 million into B.C. properties through what they thought was a trusted friend.…

…. The judge also didn’t believe Hang Yin’s daughter, Yu Yin. While benefiting greatly from the properties her father had misappropriated, the judge said the daughter falsely claimed she couldn’t communicate in English, despite a bachelors degree in economics from the University of B.C…..

…. because Mr. Zhang Jr. has died and one or more of his three young children may wish to read these reasons in the future,” the judge said, “there was no suggestion, or evidence whatsoever, that their father was engaged in the drug trade or some other criminal activities.” The judge did note, however, that Zhang was known to “keep large amounts of cash in his master bedroom.” In addition, the court heard that his chauffeur frequently delivered “duffle bags of cash” to various people, including Yi….

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columni...almost-60-million-into-metro-real-estate

Who knew working in opera was so lucrative. Well worth a read of the whole article.

[kikin]

Originally Posted by whatnext

...
Who knew working in opera was so lucrative. Well worth a read of the whole article.

Wow, sad to see this kind of thing happening in Canada

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

I agree. The empty homes tax was implemented to solve the problem of high end homes staying empty as speculative investments. We've since seen that had a marginal impact at best.

The interaction between the empty homes tax and the short term rental ban has been huge. They reinforce eachother. The number of truly empty, non-revenue generating housing stock was low. But, since every self contained individually titled AirBNB is an empty home...

[jollyburger]

“Our pipeline is now split almost evenly between purpose-built rental and condo, and we continue to take a long-term view for both,” says Dan Cupa, SVP Residential at Vancouver’s Bosa Properties. He says the current market structure requires an innovative shift.

“With rental now the dominant form of housing activity, competition is increasing, and that raises the bar,” says Cupa. “Success is measured by resident retention, operational performance, and the durability of the asset over time, which means designing rental communities with renters’ needs squarely in mind and continuing to provide exceptional property service.”

Pre-sales still matter, however. “For us, it isn’t a choice between pre-sales and rental yield,” says Cupa. “A healthy housing system needs both. Programs like BPI Equity [Bosa Properties’ rent-to-own program] reflect that reality by supporting renters who want a pathway into ownership, allowing us to build stronger relationships with our customers across different stages of their housing journey. Ultimately, success means delivering housing that works for how people live today and performs over the long term.”

While pre-sales are still important, the waning of the investor-driven condo market means a mass move away from the “investor shoebox” era that started around 2010. “Success today means designing homes for end-users with a focus on livability and enduring value,” says Cupa.

https://storeys.com/canada-developer-strategy-2026/

The 5 Key Factors Impacting The 2026 Metro Vancouver Presale Market

“The presale market will be very soft in 2026, it will be less soft in 2027, and 2028 is going to be the exact opposite,” concluded Carlson. “There will be some corrections and distressed sales here and there in 2026 that will mitigate by the end of the year and 2027 and by 2028 prices will go up again. That’s what I see and that’s what we’re basing our strategy on.”

Ever the realist, Carlson takes a bit of comfort in knowing that things really can’t get much worse.

“It can only improve from where it’s at,” he said. “I think we’ve made it as bad as we can make it. When you’re lying on the floor, there’s only one way to go: up. It’ll still feel like shit for a year, but it’s much more clear to me where we’re going and what’s happening. I still think we can make it work. We’ve created a lot of hardships for ourselves that were unnecessary, but we’ll fix it.”

https://howardchai.substack.com/p/metro-vancouver-presale-market-2026-key-factors