Tony Gioventu
Province

Dear Condo Smarts: Our 111- unit condo building in Vancouver is at war over the issue of smoking. We have been unsuccessful in the past years on passing a bylaw that would restrict smoking in common areas, and the prospect of owners not being able to smoke in their strata lots evokes a hostile response from every camp.

We have an older building that is not well ventilated, so whether someone is smoking in their strata lot or in the hallway, everyone on the floor shares the smoke. Council is ready to propose another bylaw at our AGM in May, but here’s what we need to know: Is a bylaw that prohibits smoking on common property or in a strata lot enforceable ?

— JR

Dear JR: There is some relief in store for every strata in the province when it comes to smoking on common property.

As of March 31, 2008, under the Tobacco Control Act, smoking is prohibited in places customarily available to the public.

These places could include common property areas of a strata complex. Those would include, elevators, hallways, parkades, common rooms like reception areas and swimming pools, laundries and lobbies or in the buffer zones around public areas, such as doorways or adjacent patios or entries.

So the question about smoking in common areas and enforceability has been somewhat addressed by the legislation.

But what about the strata lot ? This is nothing less than a very complicated and contentious issue. The balance is how to protect the rights of the non-smokers from secondhand smoke, especially when they share common walls, ceilings or floors and at the same time respect the rights of the smoker within their strata lot.

If your strata corporation is contemplating prohibiting smoking in strata lots then you most definitely need to seek legal advice in the creation of the bylaw, and consider accommodating those persons existing in the building who are smokers who may be heavily addicted to smoking or who have entered into tenancy agreements before the bylaw is enacted.

The strata should also consider why they are adopting this bylaw. Is it for nuisance or property-impact matters or health concerns ? The Heart and Stroke Foundation of B.C. & Yukon is developing a two-year project to address secondhand smoke in multi-unit dwellings, and is seeking your input on an important survey. You can complete the survey by going to http://ws4.voxco.com/IntWeb.dll/online/NRG/25380993 by March 25.

Tony Gioventu is executive director of the Condominium Home Owners Association. Contact CHOA at 604-584-2462 or toll-free at 1-877-353-2462, or e-mail [email protected]

© The Vancouver Province 2008

 

Pedro Arrais
Province

When buying a new home, it is important to remember there are added expenses besides the mortgage. While most homeowners are prepared, a recent Ipsos Reid poll found three in 10 B.C. residents felt unprepared for the costs and expenditures of their first year in a new home.

Industry experts say first-time purchasers should have, in addition to their down payment, sufficient funds to cover closing costs that can add thousands of dollars to the purchase price. Buyers of homes over $500,000 should set aside 2.2 per cent for the property- transfer tax. They can also expect fees for such things as a home inspection, appraisal, and site survey.

“I had no clue at first,” says first-time home buyer Janna Lunam. “I knew nothing about the added costs until I was filled in by my realtor and friends and family.”

She had to use funds out of her down payment on her new $250,000, one-bedroom condo to pay for closing costs. “It was stressful,” says Lunam, 31. “A smaller down payment meant a bigger mortgage.”

Although her real estate agent supplied her with a checklist of expected costs, she still found the fees high. Lunam estimates her closing costs added up to about five per cent of her purchase price. “It seems like a lot.”

A home inspection, which can cost between $300 and $400, is a service that many buyers request, even for a new house.

“While many buyers automatically assume a new house is close to perfect, we always find a list of deficiencies that have to be addressed,” says Kerry Smith, owner of Inspectech, a home inspection business.

Smith routinely sees a range in quality of construction, with defects not readily apparent to the homeowner. “It actually takes more time to inspect a new home.”

While repairs to a new house and condominium would be covered by a new- home warranty, potential purchasers of anything over five years old should set aside $2,000 for maintenance for the first 24 months of ownership, Smith says.

Lawyer Derek Ashurst says while most of his clients have a good idea of the cost of his services, buyers are usually unprepared when they are presented with a bill to settle the property tax on a previously owned property.

“Most buyers don’t realize they have to reimburse the seller the portion of the property tax that has already been paid,” says Ashurst. “The amount can be as high as $2,000.”

He says while a lawyer’s bill, which ranges between $800 and $1,200, might seem high to some clients, it is an essential component of the process that serves to protect the legal rights of all parties involved.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

One-bedroom units already sold out

Sun

The organizers of the Private Residences at the Hotel Georgia sales campaign have moved quarters and added a selling tool, a chef.

The sales centre’s new address is 549 Howe, between Pender and Dunsmuir. The start of the remodel of the old Hotel Georgia, site of the inaugural sales centre, forced the relocation. The chef is Vancouverite David Hawksworth.

Dana Volrich of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, the Residences’ broker, took on the job of explaining why a culinary master is a catch and a half for the Residences’ sales campaign.

“One of Vancouver‘s most celebrated chefs, recognized not just locally but internationally, in combination with Vancouver‘s most celebrated hotel makes the neighbouring Private Residences a singular offering,” she says. “Chef Hawksworth’s restaurant will play a key role in the hotel’s identity as an authentically ‘Vancouver’ hotel featuring not only a multi-award-winning chef, but the 80 years of history wrapped up within its elegant Georgian exterior.”

Typical of hotel-homes, the hotel’s amenities will be available to Residences’ residents. Hawksworth’s fare will be available in the privacy of their homes “just by dialling room service.”

A leavetaking is always a good time to take stock.

– Half of the 156 Private Residences apartments are bought. “Because the floor plans sold fairly evenly, we have a good balance of suites available, except in one bedrooms, which are sold out,” Volrich reports. The starting price on the remaining homes is $1.3 million; the smallest square footage, about 1,100.

– Most of the buyers are local. “The majority are from B.C., but there is a strong international buying contingent, from the U.S. and the U.K. and Hong Kong, Switzerland and France.”

– The values the luxury-home customer seeks from a home are different.

“The market is far less speculative in this category,” Volrich says. Buyers are more sophisticated than ever — and have more choices than ever — as to where to spend their money. They are concerned not so much about cost, but about the over-all value and quality of what they are buying: They want to know they are buying the best in contemporary design and technology; they’re also looking for location and uniqueness in the marketplace. At the Private Residences at Hotel Georgia, our buyers are looking to make a long-term investment rather than to flip. “

As you might expect, a sales centre in a historic landmark attracted many just-looking-thanks visitors.

“Many people came through who had very fond memories of the Hotel Georgia, stylish lunches, after-work drinks . . . .” Volrich reports.

“Two ladies who had worked together in housekeeping for many years, and many years ago, and who had remained friends stopped by. They were excited to witness the return of glamour and luxury to what they remember as ‘the place in town.'”

Want dinner prepared by David Hawksworth in your home?

Telephone 604-682-8107 or visit residencesatgeorgia.com on the Internet.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Fiona Anderson
Sun

Making buildings greener is the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gases, a panel at Globe 2008 told delegates Friday in Vancouver.

Buildings in Canada are responsible for about 35 per cent of greenhouse gases, said Jonathan Westeinde, chairman of an advisory group of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that released a report on green buildings earlier this week.

If nothing changes, however, those emissions will continue to grow in both the residential and commercial sectors, he said.

But by taking a best-practices approach that uses building techniques and materials that are already available and affordable — with a 10-year pay-back period or less — emissions in commercial buildings could be reduced to 1990 levels by 2030. And emissions in residential buildings would be well below 1990 levels in the same time.

“Buildings represent the single greatest opportunity to protect and enhance the natural environment and basically are the lowest hanging fruit for us to achieve significant reductions in climate change,” Westeinde said.

“And they present probably one of the few sectors where you can get the fastest reduction in those greenhouse gases in a cost-effective and economically viable way.”

But buildings are designed as inexpensively as possible, and the costs of being green are perceived as being too high, Westeinde said. In addition, it’s the occupant — not the builder — who reaps the benefits of a more energy-efficient home.

What’s needed is more information, education and cooperation, and a life-cycle approach to calculating costs, he said.

Rodney McDonald, chairman of the Manitoba chapter of the Canada Green Building Council, believes that most of the roadblocks to greener buildings are in the process associated with building and not in lack of technology.

McDonald is calling for a market transformation so that all parties in the building process — from the municipality to the owner, the architect and the tradespeople — work together to design and build.

For example, municipalities create subdivisions by laying out the roads first, he said. But that eliminates any opportunity to locate the building in a way that maximizes the benefits of the natural elements, such as sun and wind.

“It really requires a new degree of integration and coordination,” McDonald said.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Affordability continued to deteriorate in 2007, RBC report finds

Derrick Penner
Sun

It got even harder to afford a home in Metro Vancouver at the end of 2007.

RBC Economics confirmed Friday what any home shopper here knows — buying a house will eat up most of an average person’s income.

Covering the cost of a standard, 1,500-square-foot two-storey Metro Vancouver house worth $648,592 would take 79.2 per cent of the region’s median pre-tax household income, according to RBC’s fourth-quarter measure of housing affordability.

The catch is that no family making a median income — about $59,000 for Vancouver — would qualify for a mortgage on that house. At that income, even most condos in Metro are out of reach.

Median income means half of the incomes in the area are above it and half are below.

“Affordability did continue to deteriorate in the final quarter of 2007,” RBC economist Amy Goldbloom said in an interview, which was “the lagged effect of higher mortgage rates and continued increase in prices that filtered through into a higher cost of living.”

However, Goldbloom added that a bit of the pressure on housing costs should ease in B.C. during 2008 due to an expected small decline in mortgage rates and a softening in demand.

Real estate sales will decline in part because more people are being priced out of the market. Goldbloom said that will be enough to slow price increases to seven per cent, in RBC’s forecast, from 12-per-cent price gains in 2007.

Goldbloom added that RBC’s forecast is for incomes to grow “at a fairly healthy pace, but still lagging the pace of house-price gains, which is always concerning. You do need these fundamentals to keep up.”

Provincewide, the RBC report noted that the ratio of sales compared with new listings added to the market is slowing, which indicates a “gradual rebalancing” of markets.

Back to the reality of how much home qualified mortgage seekers can afford, RBC’s index tables also show the qualifying household income for a mortgage on that standard, two-storey home is actually $146,739.

The household income required to get into a 25-year mortgage on standard 1,200-square-foot Metro Vancouver bungalow would be $136,706. Using RBC’s affordability calculations, it would take 74 per cent of the median income earner’s pay to cover that mortgage, taxes and other fees.

The standard Metro Vancouver townhouse of 1,000 square feet and an average price of $443,988 would have eaten up 54.3 per cent of that median income. However, the income required to qualify for that mortgage would have been $100,520.

A standard 900-square-foot condominium was closer to affordable, requiring almost 38 per cent of that median income to support the costs of a $305,206 unit. However, the qualifying income to get into that mortgage would still have been $69,561.

Nationally, the RBC report found that, by the fourth quarter of 2007, the cost of owning a home to be at its highest level in 18 years.

“Housing affordability deteriorated across the country in every quarter in 2007, to end the year at its most unaffordable level since 1990,” said assistant chief economist Derek Holt.

The exception, however, was booming Alberta, where prices measured on the RBC index dropped from the third quarter to fourth quarter, with bungalow prices leading the way with a seven-per-cent decline.

Alberta condominium prices dipped five per cent from quarter to quarter, the second quarterly decline.

Alberta townhome prices were down four per cent in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter, the standard two-story home 4.3 per cent from the previous quarter.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Developers sprouting gardens

Allen Garr
Van. Courier

Sometime during last summer’s civic strike a Tex-Mex rib joint named Carlos ‘N Bud’s disappeared from the corner of Pacific and Seymour and a most amazing transformation took place. The building’s rubble was removed and was replaced with top soil and fencing. Sixty community garden plots were created.

The land owner, Onni Developments, formed a partnership with an activist community group called Vancouver Public Spaces Network (VPSN). VPSN is in charge of handing out the gardening spaces. And a number of those plots are already sprouting what appear to be onions and crocuses.

Community gardens are not new. They have spread across the city for years, particularly along the old CPR line along Sixth Avenue on the West Side. Then there is Strathcona Gardens east of Main. According to the city, Vancouver now has about 23 community gardens where people can grow their own vegetables and plants.

But what Onni is up to is something relatively new. It represents a move by developers to catch a green wave and make gardens a marketable amenity like swimming pools or health clubs.

This trend has two parts. The first part is using vacant private space for public use until the development goes ahead. Onni has created its garden in the downtown core, and Park Lane Homes has set aside an acre of land on the South Fraser Lands.

The garden at Seymour and Pacific is not an altogether altruistic move according to Chris Evans, Onni’s vice-president in charge of development. With Vancouver‘s homeless crisis, leaving vacant buildings standing inevitably leads to squatters and public safety problems. Putting what Evans estimates at about $100,000 into creating the garden avoids that headache and burnishes the developer’s image.

It’s a significant improvement in land use over what we see now all across the city where lots sit vacant and surrounded by chain link fences for years and do nothing more than grow weeds and collect trash that is tossed their way.

But neither Onni nor Park Lane is committing its garden space forever. This brings us to the second part of the plan. Onni’s community garden will only exist for one or two growing seasons or until the development permit is approved for condos. But part of that condo development will include garden space available for the condo owners or tenants in that building. That garden space, by the way, won’t be at ground level. It will be several stories in the air on the building’s podium at the base of the tower.

This is an advance on the concept of green roofs which are passive spaces where access to the public is usually prohibited, like the green roof at the main branch of Vancouver‘s Public Library. These new garden spaces will be set up to encourage people to plant their own flowers and veggies.

Onni is not the first developer to sell gardens as a plus in their building. According to city senior social planner Vicki Morris, the pioneers, Magellan Developments, kicked off this trend a couple of years ago with their Freesia building at Seymour and Helmcken. They have another project, Atelier on Homer Street, which will also include garden plots.

Morris says this added amenity appeals to owners in their 20s and 30s who want to live in the hustle and bustle of downtown but also want to have a back-to-the-land experience of growing their own food without leaving the city.

This spring the city will introduce a new urban agriculture policy based on work started under the former COPE/Vision council. It will strongly encourage more of these types of gardens. But there will be no benefits, like density bonuses, offered in return. Developers, like Chris Evans who was involved in developing the city policy, say that’s just fine.

Going green, it seems, is its own reward.

© Vancouver Courier 2008

Turner warns that prices may begin to fall

John Morrissy
Province

OTTAWA — With the subprime contagion spreading around the world, Canadians who hoped their homes would be immune from the carnage are wrong.

The disease is here and coming soon to your neighbourhood, says financial author and member of parliament Garth Turner.

The effects of the U.S.-induced mortgage crisis were everywhere yesterday — in the crumbling U.S. dollar, in Carlyle Capital’s $16-billion mortgage writedown in Amsterdam, in mounting housing foreclosures in the U.S. and in crashing stock markets in Europe and Asia.

“Absolutely, without a doubt, that contagion is spreading to the Canadian real-estate market,” said Turner, the author of a new book on the subject titled Greater Fool, the Troubled Future of Real Estate.

Within 18 to 24 months, Canadian homeowners could see the value of their homes fall by 10 to 15 per cent, Turner warned, saying early signs of a deteriorating real-estate market are “all around us.”

Sales of existing homes fell off the cliff in January, tumbling six per cent in January alone or 72 per cent on an annualized basis.

At the same, time the number of listings nationwide shot up 11 per cent, Turner said, quoting the Canadian Real Estate Association.

And prices are starting to fall, in such once hot markets as Calgary and Edmonton.

Turner’s advice to homebuyers is to avoid 40-year mortgages and for existing homeowners to stop basing their financial decisions on the notion that real-estate prices will continually climb.

” I think people should get used to two or three or four years of a flatlining real-estate market, at best,” Turner said.

© The Vancouver Province 2008