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  #9621  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 4:04 PM
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$400K for a house in Dildo. Damn.

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  #9622  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 6:40 PM
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Originally Posted by d_jeffrey View Post
Wow, that's outrageous. Such fees don't exist in Montréal, the only fee I know of is for the REM.

The new mayor policy on housing is expected to raise costs of new units from 3-5%.
Yes, thats why Vancouver is a crazy place. When housing prices went up and fees+taxes went up with them politicians began pointing fingers elsewhere to distract people. The rich, speculators, foreigners, etc. were the reason why new homes began costing so much.

But I have always supported that while the rich, speculators, foreigners, have had an impact, its always been the fact that new supply wasn't built to keep up with demand that led to drastic price increases. And the reason why enough supply wasn't built was because any new supply cost drastically more to build.

If you look at foreign buyers in BC, they've always been below 5% of sales. This is the American average, yet America's real estate as a whole is drastically cheaper than ours. BC's foreign buyers as a % of the total market is actually much lower than you'd expect.

However, when prices began going up, instead of developers suddenly building a lot of new housing in response to make money, the city and province began increasing fees/taxes. This led to the amount of development not increasing and thus housing prices kept skyrocketing as demand kept rising but supply didn't.

Local Vancouverities are very blind, left wing, and radical, they refuse to see the truth and deny economics. They insist that without these fees/taxes that fat developers would still charge the same and say that fees/taxes just take from rich developers to give back to the people. But Seattle went the other way and offered developers tax incentives and instead they solved the same housing crisis Vancouver faced.

In this way socialist solutions fail to solve real problems and instead worsens the problems that the free market solves daily. The left wing in BC also plays on racism, hate against the rich, fears over facts, and the disenfranchised who feel they are suffering. A party for the workers, like the German workers party. Quite a few parallels to the national socialist party. Note that if you change the D in NDP to a S you get NSP aka national socialist party aka Nazi.
     
     
  #9623  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 7:34 PM
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Vancouver has been building at a dizzying pace............it has nothing to do with supply and everything to do with who is buying it. You can build all the housing you want but if there is a Chinese crook willing to outbid you in order to launder their money, you haven't got a chance. Also when they put up condos/townhomes and 20 are sold to just 5 or 6 buyers, all the supply in the world won't make a difference. Of the 200 units sold at Marine Gateway they were bought by just 80 buyers.
     
     
  #9624  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 7:57 PM
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Originally Posted by ssiguy View Post
Vancouver has been building at a dizzying pace............it has nothing to do with supply and everything to do with who is buying it. You can build all the housing you want but if there is a Chinese crook willing to outbid you in order to launder their money, you haven't got a chance. Also when they put up condos/townhomes and 20 are sold to just 5 or 6 buyers, all the supply in the world won't make a difference. Of the 200 units sold at Marine Gateway they were bought by just 80 buyers.
In a less regulated market, this would just mean there is demand for more highrise to be built. But Vancouver does everything to stop or slow down development

Last edited by Nite; Jul 23, 2019 at 4:33 AM.
     
     
  #9625  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 8:19 PM
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Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker View Post
$400K for a house in Dildo. Damn.

It's not a house, it's a business.
     
     
  #9626  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 8:22 PM
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Originally Posted by d_jeffrey View Post
Wow, that's outrageous. Such fees don't exist in Montréal, the only fee I know of is for the REM.
Yeah, to me those fees are absolutely nuts. That's just an artificial, crazy huge barrier to entry to all new construction. A gift to anyone who already owned property at the time it was introduced.

Similarly, if for some reason we chose to introduce a new Pizza Place Tax where anyone now has to pay a nonrefundable fee of $200,000 in order to get the right to open any place that would have the right to sell pizza, the happiest people would be everyone who happens to currently own a pizzeria.
     
     
  #9627  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 8:32 PM
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Originally Posted by ssiguy View Post
Vancouver has been building at a dizzying pace............it has nothing to do with supply and everything to do with who is buying it. You can build all the housing you want but if there is a Chinese crook willing to outbid you in order to launder their money, you haven't got a chance. Also when they put up condos/townhomes and 20 are sold to just 5 or 6 buyers, all the supply in the world won't make a difference. Of the 200 units sold at Marine Gateway they were bought by just 80 buyers.
Yes, as usual Misher is full of shit.

It was a StatsCan fact that foreign buyers accounted for up to 20% of presale condo buyers in several areas at the peak. There are so many condos coming into the market that projects are being cancelled while under construction in Richmond, the hotbed of offshore buyers.

Misher has made a fool of himself so many times here, but equating the NDP with Nazis is his piéce de resistance of shit-spewing.
     
     
  #9628  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 10:05 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Yeah, to me those fees are absolutely nuts. That's just an artificial, crazy huge barrier to entry to all new construction. A gift to anyone who already owned property at the time it was introduced.

Similarly, if for some reason we chose to introduce a new Pizza Place Tax where anyone now has to pay a nonrefundable fee of $200,000 in order to get the right to open any place that would have the right to sell pizza, the happiest people would be everyone who happens to currently own a pizzeria.
I agree the fees are too high but they're including GST in that which applies to all of Canada.

(Many Canadian cities rely too much on development fees. The reason for this is to keep residential tax rates low. They tend to overtax commercial properties too. This is because city councillors set the rate and the most active and numerous voters are residential ratepayers. This has bad economic effects because people don't pay for the services they use, and it's bad for municipal finances because it drives away business and development fees are volatile.)

Some of the numbers are estimates that include the inflationary effect of zoning laws, which is of course completely valid but is probably not what people think of when you say "fee". There are 4 or 5 major and distinct policy areas driving up housing in the Vancouver area.
     
     
  #9629  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 10:59 PM
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Yes, as usual Misher is full of shit.

It was a StatsCan fact that foreign buyers accounted for up to 20% of presale condo buyers in several areas at the peak. There are so many condos coming into the market that projects are being cancelled while under construction in Richmond, the hotbed of offshore buyers.

Misher has made a fool of himself so many times here, but equating the NDP with Nazis is his piéce de resistance of shit-spewing.
Yes. At one specific moment in history of new condos foreign buyers made up a decent amount. However, they only made up 3% of the "total" market except for the 1-2 month before the FBT came in, and currently they make up 1-2% of the market yet get all the blame?

Luckily our real estate market is composed of new and old condos. If someone is willing to pay more for new, that doesn't really affect your purchase of an old place. Infact, that brings down the prices of old places as it spurs development and leads to an oversupply of used condos. Except we suddenly screwed development by putting fees, taxes, and restrictions in. It became the government cash cow.

And this is why Vancouver has a below 1% residential vacancy rate, the lowest in the nation. This is why Vancouver's office vacancy, hotel vacancy, industrial vacancy rate also leads the nation.

If this problem is only because of foreigners, how come every bloody city in America that has more foreign buyers as a % isn't experiencing the same issues? Miami went up to 80% foreign buyers at one point and while prices did go up, they didn't go up like Vancouver. London has around 20% of buyers being foreign, 10x Vancouver.

I know many Vancouerites are incredibly self centered and think this is a problem that only Vancouver faces, but it isn't. Stuff like this happens everywhere, infact its much worse in many places. Yet somehow we have the highest housing price increases, why?

To the rest of Canada, I present to you whatnext, the typical racist Vancouverite who blames blames blames instead of looking at our own policies and how they differ from the city 230km South to see why were failing while their succeeding. Instead of admitting there wrong, they just push more blame and say that what we tried isn't enough, we need more taxes! We obviously weren't trying hard enough before! In 2008 Vancouver elected a NDP mayor and NDP allied Council. In 2018 they elected another NDP mayor. Don't have sympathy for Vancouverites, they shoot themselves in the foot and keep shooting its all self inflicted.

https://www.vancourier.com/real-estate/o...sed-its-rental-housing-crisis-1.23362023

Quote:
Opinion: How Seattle reversed its rental housing crisis
Our southern neighbour is now awash with available apartments, with landlords lowering rents and offering incentives


With Metro Vancouver creaking under the strain of sub-1 per cent apartment vacancy rates and Canada’s highest rents, it’s eye-opening to look just south of the border at what’s happening in Seattle.

The Emerald City – once itself struggling with low vacancies (although not as low as ours) due to its Amazon-centric tech boom – is now awash with available apartments. Which means rents are falling.

In downtown Seattle, the vacancy rate is a whopping 25.7 per cent, according to the Seattle Times. And in newly completed downtown apartment buildings, around 40 per cent of units are currently empty. In surrounding areas of the city it is not quite as extreme, but still high – South Lake Union vacancies (both new and older units) are now at 13.9 per cent, and in Central/South Seattle they are 11 per cent...

Rather than taking the dripfeed approach that has been characteristic of Vancouver’s new rental housing supply in recent years, Seattle has completely flooded the market with new-build apartments in a very short space of time. In the 2015-2019 period, the city has opened or is opening more new apartments than in the previous 50 years combined. And in 2016, Seattle spent more per-capita on new multi-family construction than any other U.S. city, according to a study by ApartmentList.

Faced with nation-leading population growth and a major tech industry boom led by the Amazon HQ in downtown Seattle, developers threw everything they had at building new rental units. From their point of view, they seem to have overshot, as the new supply was enough to outpace the projected population growth and demand surge. After that, it’s just supply-and-demand economics that leads to lower rents.
Btw I often post the below image. Look at what whatnext is complaining about being responsible for all the real estate woes in Vancouver, that tiny gray part of the bars. Does anyone here agree with whatnext that the tiny grey part is 100% to blame for Vancouver's housing market? I've seen people say foreign buyers are hiding it after the FBT. But you'll see that even before the FBT (that jump in grey in 2016) foreign buyers only made up 1-2% of the market. So it doesn't make sense that foreign buyers are to blame, so we put a tax in, and suddenly there's a ton of secret foreign buyers who find our real estate more attractive as there's a tax they have to avoid?

The reason for Vancouver's housing market, the reason that has always made logical and economic sense, is that we're an attractive place with high demand and supply has not kept up with demand. And government is whats hindering supply. Also I never got how people manage to blame foreign buyers for our low rental vacancy rate. You'd think a sub 1% vacancy rate would clue people in that we need more homes. But they then made up this theory that all foreign owned homes are empty. This despite research showing that the average vacancy rate in Canada for homes is 5% yet in Vancouver its around 2%. Somehow Vancouverites convinced themselves that its speculators and investors making homes empty that caused a 1% vacancy rate, yet this argues against reasonable logic that says no one is going to leave a home empty they could be making money off by renting.


Last edited by misher; Jul 22, 2019 at 11:21 PM.
     
     
  #9630  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 11:28 PM
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misher, aren't Seattle rents significantly HIGHER than Vancouver rents? If you successfully "took inspiration from your Cascadia southern neighbor", whatever it is that they're doing, and managed to imitate them, the result is that rents in Vancouver would rise, not the other way around.

(The average figure I'm finding for rents in Seattle is ~$2,600 CAD a month nowadays. Quite a bit higher than Van.)


BTW, rents in Van being very low (compared to real estate prices) are a DEAD GIVEAWAY of speculation - i.e. it indicates that (a lot of) the demand is for real estate only as an investment vehicle, not as a Vancouver roof over one's Vancouver-living head.
     
     
  #9631  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 11:29 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
misher, aren't Seattle rents significantly HIGHER than Vancouver rents? If you successfully "took inspiration from your Cascadia southern neighbor", whatever it is that they're doing, and managed to imitate them, the result is that rents in Vancouver would rise, not the other way around.

(The average figure I'm finding for rents in Seattle is ~$2,600 CAD a month nowadays. Quite a bit higher than Van.)
Yes, wages are much higher too.

I'm referring to the issues of ultra low vacancies and rapidly rising rents.

Seattle has always been more expensive than Vancouver but both cities experienced rapid rental rate increases.

Seattle reacted and kept rents from rising and solved the vacancy rate. Vancouver reacted and rents continue to rise and vacancies would go down except they can't really go any lower. Look at the below and tell me Vancouver has done a good job solving the problem.



     
     
  #9632  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 11:34 PM
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To the rest of Canada, I present to you whatnext, the typical racist Vancouverite who blames blames blames instead of looking at our own policies ...
"The rest of Canada" (or, more specifically, anyone in it with a brain) wholeheartedly agrees with whatnext that foreign buyers are the reason Vancouver real estate is completely out of whack with local incomes and local rents and local CoL.

If that's racist, then so be it. (It means I'm stuck being either "racist" or stupid, and I'd pick the former, out of these two.)
     
     
  #9633  
Old Posted Jul 22, 2019, 11:37 PM
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Yes, wages are much higher too.

I'm referring to the issues of ultra low vacancies and rapidly rising rents.
Well, the important thing is that we're all in agreement with the fact that housing is significantly cheaper in Vancouver than it is in Seattle. And it follows that there aren't really lessons to be learned from Seattle there.

(Meanwhile, it's true that a glass-and-steel-bitcoin will cost you more in Vancouver than in Seattle, but that's unrelated to housing.)
     
     
  #9634  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 1:47 AM
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"The rest of Canada" (or, more specifically, anyone in it with a brain) wholeheartedly agrees with whatnext that foreign buyers are the reason Vancouver real estate is completely out of whack with local incomes and local rents and local CoL.

If that's racist, then so be it. (It means I'm stuck being either "racist" or stupid, and I'd pick the former, out of these two.)
Considering BC’s foreign buyer % has never been above the American average yes it does make you racist. For centuries foreigners have been blamed for every wrong in BC and I’m disgusted to be part of a city that condones blatant racism. Hell 100 years ago people complained that foreigners were too poor and couldn’t afford a nice house like locals. I hope the rest of Canada is as disgusted as I am with Vancouver. In the end if you want to put in a foreign buyer tax so be it but don’t keep blaming foreigners for every evil afterwards.








And just to draw some parallels look at how this compares to a letter sent to an Indian family in Alberta


People in Vancouver are using real estate as an excuse for their racism and hate, many who face discrimination were born here. Similar to how anti semiticism only became open when Germany’s economy had issues. In the end foreigners were poor 100 years ago and faced similar persecution and now that there successful they face the same story. In Vancouver being colored makes you a criminal.

Last edited by misher; Jul 23, 2019 at 2:04 AM.
     
     
  #9635  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 3:25 AM
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Vancouver's such a racist city of 2.5 million people that to prove it you have to scrounge up anonymous leaflets and letters from years ago and then pad the list out with something from Alberta...

It reminds me of Hedy Fry.
     
     
  #9636  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 3:41 AM
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People in Vancouver are using real estate as an excuse for their racism and hate
Actually, the other way around IMO - people are using (very weak) accusations of racism as a way of trying to avoid acknowledging the cold hard reality that Vancouver real estate prices have over the past few decades been bid up to stratospheric levels that are absolutely out of whack with local wages and rents.

My opinion that millions of dollars for a modest cookie-cutter bungalow in a second rate city makes no sense at all (and can only be the fruit of rampant speculation) is not "racist", regardless of your claims. In fact I prefer the label "basic common sense".

Plus, I'm on record in this very thread WELCOMING the Billionaire Chinese Swarms to my neck of the woods, how more friendly do you want me to be? I'm even willing to learn some Mandarin! (For the buyer who'd take my entire Sherbrooke portfolio at the "right price", I would! I'm not kidding )
     
     
  #9637  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 3:45 AM
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I’m disgusted to be part of a city that condones blatant racism.
Cash out and move away, then!

You'll probably be able to afford a palace in any other area of the country!
     
     
  #9638  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 3:53 AM
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If Vancouver sets the bar for 'disgusting racism', then I don't think there are any places that would meet misher's standards of acceptability. Certainly not China.
     
     
  #9639  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 4:01 AM
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And just to draw some parallels look at how this compares to a letter sent to an Indian family in Alberta
Looking at the first sentence, it's the diametrical opposite in Vancouver - after the Chinese move into a neighborhood (and buy it), there's no need for anyone to lock any doors anymore - the houses are used as bitcoins so they're empty, nothing to steal! (The value's in the land anyway. No one cares about the condition of the house.)
     
     
  #9640  
Old Posted Jul 23, 2019, 7:55 AM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
misher, aren't Seattle rents significantly HIGHER than Vancouver rents? If you successfully "took inspiration from your Cascadia southern neighbor", whatever it is that they're doing, and managed to imitate them, the result is that rents in Vancouver would rise, not the other way around.

(The average figure I'm finding for rents in Seattle is ~$2,600 CAD a month nowadays. Quite a bit higher than Van.)


BTW, rents in Van being very low (compared to real estate prices) are a DEAD GIVEAWAY of speculation - i.e. it indicates that (a lot of) the demand is for real estate only as an investment vehicle, not as a Vancouver roof over one's Vancouver-living head.
Yes Misher doesn’t seem to understand that Seattle rentals were built in response to actual demand for real people looking for housing. Whereas Vancouver’s condo boom was a result of people looking to park cash.

And here’s an article quoting one of Vancouver’s most successful realtors clearly stating foreign buyers inflated Vancouver’s housing prices:
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/beta.ctvnews.ca/local/british-columbia/2019/2/4/1_4282140.html
     
     
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