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Even townhomes are not that expensive. A friend of mine bought a good sized townhome within Vancouver boundary for about $600k a couple of years ago, for her family of 3. If another child is born that space is enough too. It is not huge but big enough for their needs, with great location.
The obsession over single family homes (sometimes as far as "detached home") is what makes it so unaffordable and the media keeps using that benchmark as if that's what everyone NEEDS. I'd say that's hardly a problem - try to buy a single family home in Europe or Asia and see how affordable it is.
I have said it several times, people in Vancouver and Toronto will just have to accept the fact that if you are not capable of making the top 5% income (or have a handsome inheritance), you just need to accept the fact that your family will have to live in a condo/townhouse. 90% of the world population does it, so can you.
Can't afford it? don't blame the city, or the Chinese, blame your parents for not being rich, or blame the fact that you are not good enough to make $200,000/year, OK? I heard Goldman Sachs is recruiting, why not give it a try?
Single home living in Vancouver/Toronto should not be consider as typical "middle class" lifestyle. It is rich people's life, forget about it.
Botti newsflash for you....condo are also very expensive in Vancouver especially compared to the salary level.
Is becoming "fashionable" to live in sub 300 sq/ft condos in Vancouver
...for a cool 170K....my tool shed is almost as big.....
We are all familiar with those sensational numbers. On paper condo price is in the 600-700/sf range according to the newspapers, but almost always they only look at those new shining condos in downtown as if everyone has to live in those buildings. The real market is far more affordable than that.
Those new condos always have a huge price premium, with all sorts of fancy amenities - large pools, theatres, gyms, party rooms, 24h concierge etc etc. Does everyone really need those? Despite what the stats say, it is still not hard to find something a lot cheaper than that. A more spacious unit, in an older building, with few amenities can come at 2/3 of the price.
226sf condos exist in HK or Manhattan. Not gonna surprise me. They cater to people with limited means and limited need for space and they are a niche market. Even in Vancouver, it is not difficult to find a well maintained condo for under $600,000 large enough for a family.
But if a family of 4 think they need 1800sf minimum, with separate dining/living/family rooms (God forbids doing all these in the same room!) with extra guest rooms, then I have nothing to say. One should buy only the space he needs 360 days of the year, not the rooms he uses less than 5 times a year.
Whenever Vancouver tops the lists in terms of housing price, I can't help wondering how come that's the case. Then it says something like "the medium detached home in Vancouver tops $2million" then I instantly understand what the fuss is about. You know what, the same 2000sf detached home in much of the rest of the urban world most likely costs more, people just don't expect to live there unless they are ultra rich, while every average Vancouver family thinks they are entitled to one.
We are all familiar with those sensational numbers. On paper condo price is in the 600-700/sf range according to the newspapers, but almost always they only look at those new shining condos in downtown as if everyone has to live in those buildings. The real market is far more affordable than that.
Those new condos always have a huge price premium, with all sorts of fancy amenities - large pools, theatres, gyms, party rooms, 24h concierge etc etc. Does everyone really need those? Despite what the stats say, it is still not hard to find something a lot cheaper than that. A more spacious unit, in an older building, with few amenities can come at 2/3 of the price.
226sf condos exist in HK or Manhattan. Not gonna surprise me. They cater to people with limited means and limited need for space and they are a niche market. Even in Vancouver, it is not difficult to find a well maintained condo for under $600,000 large enough for a family.
But if a family of 4 think they need 1800sf minimum, with separate dining/living/family rooms (God forbids doing all these in the same room!) with extra guest rooms, then I have nothing to say. One should buy only the space he needs 360 days of the year, not the rooms he uses less than 5 times a year.
Whenever Vancouver tops the lists in terms of housing price, I can't help wondering how come that's the case. Then it says something like "the medium detached home in Vancouver tops $2million" then I instantly understand what the fuss is about. You know what, the same 2000sf detached home in much of the rest of the urban world most likely costs more, people just don't expect to live there unless they are ultra rich, while every average Vancouver family thinks they are entitled to one.
Of course there are going to be condos with outlandish prices in Vancouver, like in every other city with lots of foreign investment. That by no means represents the overall market.
2 years ago my parents bought a condo/townhouse in Vancouver (border between Vancouver and neighboring city called Burnaby). It is 1,100 sq ft, 2 bedrooms, 2 bath, brand new development with a small garden and yard, for $360,000. They bought it as a rental property and now it is valued at about $400,000. In my eyes, those prices are extremely affordable, in a great central location with access to rapid transit.
So I don't know where people get these sensationalist stories that condo prices are through the roof and people are living in "300 sq ft condos" in Vancouver. In downtown or West Vancouver near the waterfront, yes, because you are paying for the views and the location. Outside the city center, a $300,000 1-2 bed condo is NOT unaffordable and very easy to find these days, even for people with mediocre income in Vancouver.
My sister and brother-in-law own a single family home in Vancouver. 33 foot frontage. Parking in the back off the alley. The houses on either side of them have been sold for about $1.5 million, scraped off the lot, and replaced with the biggest house allowed by the city. A Chinese woman with halting English with two really cute English-fluent kids lives on one side. Her husband is back in China working. The house on the other side isn't finished yet. At some point, my sister and brother-in-law will age to the point where they'll do the same thing and swap to a house or condo that does not require climbing stairs.
My frame of reference is Boston. An equivalent teardown on a small lot in a high end inner suburb isn't worth $1.5 million US (and I'm ignoring this year's Canuckistani Peso currency problem from crashed oil prices). It's worth less than half that. That also aligns with my Nassau & Westchester County NYC friends.
I don't see anything like what's happened in Vancouver over the last 20 years anywhere east of the Mississippi. There's more of it on the west coast but nothing to the degree of HongCouver.
They cater to people with limited means and limited need for space and they are a niche market. Even in Vancouver, it is not difficult to find a well maintained condo for under $600,000 large enough for a family.
Botti 600K is a lot for a condo, especially in a city where wages are not exactly high....
In Seattle (and with a very different economic environment) 600K still can get you a lot of property....
By the way, even in densely populated Europe I bet that average price for detached family homes are lower if you exclude the crazy expensive cities like London or Paris.
I came back last week from Italy and I was really surprised by prices asked for very high quality homes (not the wooden shacks we live in in North America) often in premium locations close to the sea.
Who is complaining?? Not me....just replied to Botti, 600K is not exactly affordable for a condo...period....if people buy the price is right.
By the way, by US standard Seattle is a very expensive RE market...everything is relative....
everything in the Us is cheaper, why do we compare real estate in a different country? How does that ever make sense? Why not Norway or Monaco? Should the Chinese compare house price with Korea or India?
600k is not cheap, right, but Vancouver isn't cheap to start with. You buy what you can afford and all I am saying is there is much more affordable housing in the city yet people keep looking at SFHs as if they can't live without it.
Despite all the hype about expensive DT condos in Toronto, I live in a 650sf one with a $300k or so price tag, is it expensive to you? It is five minutes walk to City Hall in case you wonder where it is. Alternatively I could spend the same money on a 425sf shining box in the sky 3 minutes away with great views and complain about how unaffordable the city is. Vancouver is the same. You just have to compromise on certain things.
Regarding Boston, he probably talked about a bad neibourhood. My good friend bought an old three bedroom in Newton for 1.1 million 2 years ago and sold it for 1.3 mil a year later because she had to move. Boston is definitely expensive, and unlike Vancouver, renting is extremely expensive too, at least twice as high.
I think you get the drift. I have no idea why people come down on Vancouver so hard when it comes to this topic, when every major city is basically in the game.
Yes skyrocketing housing prices are a problem for the middle class and maybe Vancouver doesn't share the same robust economic conditions with many of these other cities. But seriously what are they supposed to do if foreign buyers want to invest in their city?
Oh, I won't necessarily blame foreign investors for skyrocketing house prices in those cities. They've been known to be astronomically expensive since before the Chinese got rich. It's all about supply and demand.
You hear more complain about Vancouver but not about those cities because people in US have plenty of choices to live and find work with affordable housing + good weather. Not so in Canada.
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