Don’t be fooled by reading only strata plan

Tony Gioventu
Province

Dear Condo Smarts:

Our letter is more of a warning to other people who buy into a bare-land strata, but we also have a question.

We bought a house in a typical “subdivision” in the Okanagan in August 2007. It was perfect for us: all on one level, a quiet adult gated community that was safe and secure.

At the time of our purchase, the real estate agent told us it was the perfect investment for our needs. Moreover, the agent told us that even though it was a strata, it was a bare-land strata and that other than a common road we were totally independent and no one would interfere with the use of our property.

In essence, it seemed like simply a more economic way of owning a single-family home. Half a year later, we are facing a $25,000 special levy per home to rebuild our water delivery and sewage system, and new regulations on water treatment and delivery that threaten to impose an even greater cost and burden on owners.

Before anyone buys, they need to understand one thing: What’s the difference between a bare-land strata and a building-type strata?

— LC, Okanagan

In basic terms, there is no operational difference between a bare-land strata and a building-type strata, commonly referred to as townhouses or condos.

Unlike a building-type plan, in a bare- land strata, the strata corporation has no insurable interest in buildings not shown on the strata plan. The result generally is that the house is entirely part of the strata lot and the repair, maintenance and insurance of the bare land strata lot and home is normally the responsibility of the strata lot owner.

But don’t be fooled by only reading the plan. A strata corporation may take responsibility for certain portions of a strata lot. To understand if the strata is going to be paying the bills for any parts of a strata lot, you would have to read the bylaws before you purchase.

For example, where all of the homes are identical on a bare land, the developer or strata owners may have created or adopted bylaws where the strata will be responsible for building exteriors to ensure they are routinely repaired and maintained.

The strata corporation may adopt bylaws that prohibit rentals, set age restrictions, limit or restrict pets, parking, use of common facilities and even go as far as determine the colour of your house or alterations to your strata lot.

Bare land owners are also subject to strata fees, special levies and settlements of law suits. Before you buy, read the bylaws and review the strata plan.

Find out what common facilities you are going to be paying for. Request a copy of the strata insurance policy. Even a bare-land strata must retain insurance for a minimum of $2 million in liability insurance and fully insure its common assets.

If the strata hosts its own water and sewage facilities, those are costs you will be paying for in the future.

Tony Gioventu is executive director of the Condominium Home Owners Association.

E-mail him at [email protected]

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Rich parents, real-estate profits and high incomes help

Lena Sin
Province

Photograph by : Gerry Kahrmann file — the province

Let’s face it, being a young professional couple just doesn’t cut it any more if you want entry to Vancouver‘s west side, where virtually every home goes for over a million.

So who’s buying?

The answer is anyone with one or more of the following: wealthy boomer parents, equity from previous real estate or extremely high double-income earnings.

But even with those prerequisites, many are stretching their limits.

“Everybody maxes,” says Marty Pospischil, a realtor with Dexter Realty specializing in the west side.

The profile of a typical buyer of a $1.3-million, three-bed, two-bath west-side home is a couple between 35 and 45 years old with one or two young children. They are both professionals who have ascended the ranks — think stockbroker, lawyer, doctor.

They will usually have a down payment of $400,000 to $500,000 — derived from a combination of personal equity, inheritance or a substantial gift from a wealthy boomer parent, says Pospischil.

That means they’re still borrowing between $800,000-$900,000.

To make ends meet, the couple will rent out the basement for $1,500 a month. The rest — monthly mortgage payments of $3,500 to $4,000 — must be covered by income. “These are hefty mortgages. So they’re scraping for every penny that they can get,” says Pospischil.

The story on the east side is similar.

Lisa MacIntosh, a realtor specializing in first-time buyers on the east side, says her clients fall into two categories.

One is the single buyer — often female — in their 30s purchasing a condo in those three-storey walk-ups from the 1970s.

MacIntosh’s other buyer is the young professional couple in their 30s with one, possibly two kids, looking to buy a detached house for between $600,000 and $800,000.

Like their west-side counterparts, they are “trust-fund kids” who have received help from boomer parents. Some got in the condo market a few years ago and made a healthy profit.

“It is definitely a stretch,” says MacIntosh. “Most of them, 90 per cent of the time, there’s a need for a basement suite to help cover the mortgage costs.”

Drug money is also making its way into B.C. real estate, police say.

“We do know some of that money is making its way into construction, land development and hence real estate in terms of housing,” said Sgt. Shinder Kirk, spokesman for the Integrated Gang Task Force.

The extent to which drug money is being laundered into property is difficult to quantify. But Kirk says the most notable example occurred last December when police seized nine luxury homes worth $6 million in Vancouver under proceeds-of-crime legislation.

Vancouver‘s also a prime destination for off-shore buyers who will spend $2,000 per square foot for the right location, says Bob Rennie, one of the city’s most influential realtors.

But Rudy Nielsen, president of Landcor, a real-estate analysis firm, says the number of absentee owners in B.C. is not high.

Last year, real-estate volume across B.C. reached 158,000 sales, with a total value of $62 billion. Data by Landcor show only six per cent (9,300 sales) were by buyers who live out of province. The majority of them are from Alberta (6,319 sales) followed by the U.S. (819 sales).

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Price correction expected in future, but Vancouver will remain pricey

Lena S
Province

Tsur Somerville is the director of the University of B.C. Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate

There’s the prediction, or hope, among those who have given up on today’s housing market that prices will fall dramatically after the 2010 Olympics.

Recent news reports have already reported there’s been a slight chill in the B.C. real-estate market this year.

But a TD Bank report released in April also said the risk of a real-estate collapse is low in B.C.

Tsur Somerville, a University of B.C. professor who has been studying the rise and fall of housing prices in Vancouver from 1979 to the present, says he expects a price correction in the near future.

But the question for so many is: Will it be enough?

“With housing markets, it doesn’t have to be that a correction happens by prices dropping and magically being affordable,” says Somerville. “They can work by things growing flat or very slowly for an extended period until population and incomes catch up.”

Prices can also decline mildly before rising again, which is what happened in Vancouver between 1994 and 2001.

History has shown that the longest period of sustained house- price increases in Vancouver lasted for about five years. The current boom, which began in 2002, is reaching seven years and many question if we’re in a housing bubble that’s about to burst.

Somerville says he’s reluctant to use the B-word because the numbers are not adding up to such a scenario.

“If you say bubble, then at some point it’s going to pop. And if you look at our price increases, they’ve been double-digit, but for the most part they’ve been between 11 to 15 per cent for the past few years. That’s high, but in a bubble you start to see 20-per-cent growth, 30-per-cent growth. Just really rapid acceleration, and we haven’t seen that. That’s what happened in 1981 and 1982 . . . That’s what a bubble looks like.”

Helmut Pastrick, the chief economist for Credit Union Central of B.C., concurs with Somerville.

He suspects the Vancouver market is now in the beginning stages of a cooldown. Pastrick is predicting modest price increases for the next two years and potentially small declines after 2010.

“If you’re holding off because ‘Why should I buy now if it’s going to drop 20 per cent next year?’ I think that’s a bit of a gamble. A person’s well within their right to do that, obviously, but just bear in mind the general view is there will still be a price increase this year and another next year,” says Pastrick.

Pastrick says he is not expecting the conditions — an economic recession or a sharp rise in interest rates — that would generate a substantial price drop to materialize.

“And at this point, the general view is the Canadian economy and U.S. economy will be growing at a faster pace next year,” he says.

Somerville says the other scenario that could lead to big price drops is an oversupply of housing — achieved if droves of people dump their homes on the market, which he doesn’t expect will happen.

There’s only one certainty Somerville is willing to bank on: “The only thing that’s not temporary is that Vancouver‘s going to be expensive. You have to start from that point — then it’s a question of is it ‘normal expensive’ or not?”

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Lena Sin
Province

“I want to stay in Vancouver because I love this city, but housing is becoming an issue. I want space, I want a home, I want a big family, I want a big house – the whole shebang. But can I stay in Vancouver to do that?” –Mary Ann Masesar. — Jon Murray — the province

“The fear, which has been going on for many, many years, is that this is going to be executive city and there’s going to be no room for anyone else..” – Warren Gill, Urban geographer and vice-president of university relations at SFU, seen here in the alley behind his townhouse at West 7th Avenue and Oak Street. : Jon Murray — the province

We look at the choices and compromises people must make in order to own a home today. It is increasingly common to see children raised in condos, married couples living in their parents’ basements, young professionals taking on second jobs, workers commuting long hours and the growth of the 40-year mortgage. We look at how they do it

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard.

As a second-generation Filipino-Canadian, Mary Ann Masesar was taught the key to middle-class wealth was owning a home.

To acquire that status symbol, all one needed to do was stay in school, work hard and get a good job. Only, it doesn’t happen that way any more.

As a Vancouver nurse, Masesar belongs to an exclusive club of the top 10 per cent of Canadians who earn more than $69,000 a year, according to Statistics Canada.

But that modest dream of owning a house — or something bigger than a downtown studio — seems virtually impossible in Vancouver‘s current housing market.

With the income-to-house-price ratio the highest it’s ever been in B.C., the overwhelming perception — particularly in Vancouver — is that the market has changed the definition of “middle class” and displaced the working poor.

It is increasingly common to see children raised in condos, married couples living in their parents’ basements, young professionals taking on second jobs, workers commuting long hours, the growth of the 40-year mortgage (which 65 per cent of first-time buyers are now using, according to a RE/MAX report) and the realization for some that an inheritance is the only way to a single-family home.

Of course, there is another running narrative here: Those who are simply not willing to compromise and are waiting for prices to come crashing back to earth.

Masesar, 32, has been waiting 10 years for this to happen. She now regrets waiting so long.

“I want to stay in Vancouver because I love this city, but housing is becoming an issue. I want space, I want a home, I want a big family, I want a big house — the whole shebang. But can I stay in Vancouver to do that?” she asks.

Urban geographer Warren Gill says Masesar isn’t alone.

“The fear, which has been going on for many, many years, is that this is going to be executive city and there’s going to be no room for anyone else,” says Gill.

“Will it be like San Francisco, where all the firefighters and police officers can’t afford to live in the city, so they live outside? I mean, I think these are useful questions to ask.”

–

Carlos Hinkson is what you would call a believer.

He believes in Vancouver‘s housing market, that it’s not likely to crash, even amid apocalyptic predictions by some of a post-Olympic bust.

This is just one of the many reasons why after three years of living in a Langley townhouse, Hinkson’s calling it quits on the burbs and moving back to Vancouver.

“This is what I ask myself and my wife all the time: ‘Why do we live here?’ Because we don’t have to live here,” says Hinkson.

“And the reason I live here is not for Langley. If I’m going to live in Langley, I could live in Lloydminster, (Alta.). Or I could move to Nanaimo. But I live here to be close to Vancouver. I want to live close to Vancouver because I love Vancouver. We all love Vancouver. That’s the one thing that brings us all together.”

Besides, chasing the white picket fence just isn’t what it used to be.

“Moving to Langley is not much cheaper. Yeah, you can buy a house, but not for less than $500,000,” says Hinkson.

Hinkson is handsome and outgoing, and you could imagine him not so long ago spending his downtime at a bar or catching a show downtown. But today, Hinkson and his wife are parents to four-year-old Max, part of the reason why they bought a home in Langley after renting for years in Vancouver and New Westminster.

The couple, both 30, bought their home for $330,000. Hinkson figures it could fetch about $375,000 today. Needless to say, that doesn’t translate to much in Vancouver.

They’re considering raising their son in a condo, perhaps even a loft.

They could also buy a Vancouver Special, an east-side fixer-upper, for an estimated $600,000 to $650,000. To pay for that, Hinkson is considering asking his parents to move in so they can pool their funds.

Or, get a 35- to 40-year mortgage plus rent out the basement suite.

Hinkson and his wife both make good money; he as a salesman of heavy equipment and she as a geographical information systems specialist for B.C. Hydro.

He suspects their household income puts them near the top five per cent of household incomes in Canada. Yet, he remains fiercely determined to earn more, his gaze fixed on the property ladder.

For a while, Hinkson took on a second job, working at a club downtown. He knows lots of people who do: Firefighters who work as contractors on days off, a friend who’s raising her two kids in Yaletown by working full time, plus moonlighting at a club twice a week.

The nighttime commute for Hinkson, however, eventually took its toll. Especially given that his day job often requires driving to an office in North Vancouver. On those days he leaves home at 5 a.m. — just to skip rush-hour traffic.

Contemplating that last thought on a sunny morning, Hinkson adds: “Today, my son will spend 10 hours in daycare.”

–

Home ownership as a rite of passage for the young couple starting out was a tradition that started in the early 20th century in B.C.

Warren Gill, 58, says when both his grandparents immigrated to Vancouver from the U.K., it was the first time either side of his family could own a home.

One grandfather, a gardener, bought in Mount Pleasant; the other, a worker in a manufacturing company, bought in Dunbar.

Gill’s parents followed in the same tradition, but by the time he was ready to purchase his first home in 1986 at the age of 35, the single-family dwelling in Vancouver was already out of reach.

Gill, vice-president of university relations at Simon Fraser Univer-sity, eventually settled in a townhouse in False Creek.

“It’s sad,” says Matthew Miyagawa, 30. “Some of my friends who are professionally employed people think they can never live in the city.”

Affordability is an issue in the suburbs as well. The latest figures show it takes 79.2 per cent of the average Metro Vancouver worker’s pre-tax income to buy a 1,500-square-foot house, an 18-year high.

Metro Vancouver‘s median household income of $69,688 wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage on the typical house, now $764,616, according to March figures released by the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board.

Miyagawa, a federal biologist who sports geek-chic tortoise-shell glasses, has never been unemployed.

He saved enough to buy his first Vancouver condo three years ago for $250,000, a price many would now consider a steal.

But the mortgage is such a burden that Miyagawa wants to go back to renting.

“I’m living month to month, that’s what scares me. That hasn’t happened to me since I was 14 and working at the mall,” he says.

–

Buying a home has never been easy, but some believe the problem is now compounded by the high expectations of today’s 20- or 30-something buyer.

“They want a home, a high-powered car, go on out-of-country vacations and they want to go to Earl’s or Milestones two to three times a week,” says Peter Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders Association.

“Today’s parents, a lot of them are cash-rich baby boomers and they encourage their children to have it all. And there’s an expectation they can have it all. And sometimes they have to make sacrifices.”

The high cost of housing means headhunting agencies are finding it difficult to recruit executives to work in a city that was once considered the envy of the country.

“Never mind the junior positions, but even the senior positions where some of these people are having six-figure packages thrown at them . . . There’s definitely reluctance to come out here,” says Greg Ford, vice-president of Greg Aplin Recruiting in Vancouver.

The University of B.C. is no stranger to the problem, either. Junior professors commuting from as far away as the Canada-U.S. border in South Surrey have put off others from joining the faculty.

Neil Sutherland, a 77-year-old retired UBC professor, is convinced it has reduced the sense of community on campus. He recalls after-work hockey games with colleagues and dinners at the now-defunct faculty club, which no longer take place. “People wonder why the faculty club failed. Well, it’s because nobody lives out here any more,” he says.

Until now, there has been little research on the social consequences of skyrocketing house prices in B.C., although that is beginning to change.

One UBC study is looking at the link between people’s professions and where they live in Greater Vancouver.

Another, by UBC sociology Prof. Nathaneal Lauster, is studying the links between Vancouver real-estate prices and people’s willingness to start families.

“I want to see how people understand [the question]: ‘Am I providing a good environment for my family?’ I’m interested in seeing how people are dealing with these moral ideas of what kind of housing is needed to start a family,” says Lauster.

Housing has always been an emotional subject because so many believe where they live is a part of their identity.

“It’s not just the place where you live, it’s a symbol of who you are,” says Lauster. “And that sort of meaning is important. It’s something that tends to be overlooked by real-estate economists and people who just think this is consumption of living space. I think that’s why passions run so high. And of course, connected to that identity, there’s real financial risks and benefits to be had. Combine those things together, and yeah, passions run high.” [email protected]

CHILDLESS CITIES

“Somehow, when we weren’t paying attention, Seattle lost half of its children,” lamented the former mayor of Seattle, Charles Royer, in a Seattle Times editorial last November.

Escalating real-estate prices have driven families out of the city, a scenario that has played out in several U.S. cities.

Royer noted there are 90,000 fewer children in Seattle today than there were in 1960. As Seattle‘s population grew by 10,000 between 2000 and 2005, its population of children under 18 grew by just 200.

Andrew Ramlo, a demographer at the Urban Futures Institute, says he has not seen the same dramatic decline in the number of children in Vancouver.

A TD Canada Trust poll released last Wednesday showed almost half of Vancouverites (48 per cent) would consider raising a family in a condo, up from 34 per cent in 2007.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Sun

A house is more than a home. It is a store of wealth, an accumulator of equity, an asset that can be leveraged and a legacy that can be left to the next generation.

A 2003 study by Peter Nares and Jennifer Robson-Haddow of the charitable institution Social and Enterprise Development Innovations found that not only do homeowners have higher levels of civic engagement than renters but enjoy better marital stability, family health and well-being among dependent children. Other studies show homeowners are better off than renters in retirement. Then there’s the pride of ownership that cannot be expressed in dollars and cents.

For all these reasons, governments have come to see home ownership as a laudable societal goal and have put certain policies in place to promote it.

To make home ownership more accessible to those lacking the requirements for the traditional mortgage — namely, a down payment of 25 per cent and an amortization term of no more than 25 years — new financial products have been introduced that have dramatically changed Canada’s housing market.

Remember the TV ads by a pitchman selling a guide to buying real estate with no money down? Well, a couple of years ago, Canada Housing and Mortgage Corp., a federal government agency, was released from restrictions that chained it to the conventional mortgage. Now, with a product called CMHC Flex 100, it can finance 100 per cent of a home’s value. Potential purchasers need only show a track record of managing debt and the financial capacity to cover the carrying costs to qualify for a loan. CMHC, which used to be constrained by price ceilings, was also freed in 2003 from any limits on purchase prices.

Perhaps the most popular innovation in the housing market is the 40-year mortgage, introduced in 2006. It didn’t take long to catch on. Three-quarters of all monthly insured-mortgage applications now are for extended terms, with the 40-year product accounting for half of that, according to a report this week by Scotiabank.

Not only has the pool of potential buyers grown but, by spreading payments over a longer period, a buyer can bid on a more expensive property than he or she could otherwise afford. However, this scenario is not without risk. Assume a home purchase of $450,000 with no money down and a 40-year amortization. A CMHC premium of 3.75 per cent of the face value of the loan adds $16,650 to the cost. At current interest rates, it would take a decade to pay off the insurance premium alone and more than 30 years before the amount paid in interest dropped below the amount applied to principal.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney told the House of Commons finance committee last week that he’s concerned about the prevalence of high loan-to-value mortgage products. “They add momentum in the housing market and, if everyone has a 40-year amortization mortgage, then you just have higher housing prices,” he said.

Scotiabank warned that “future shock risk is being intensified” in the event that 40-year mortgages become the norm and highly-leveraged buyers suddenly face an unfavourable turn in interest rates or wage growth. “That’s uncharted waters for the Canadian mortgage industry,” said Derek Holt, vice-president of economics for Scotia Capital, Scotiabank’s investment banking arm.

Despite the liberalization of Canada‘s mortgage market, lending practices still are conservative compared with the free-for-all in the United States that led to the subprime mortgage debacle. Although Canada is not as vulnerable to a housing crisis as the U.S. was, there are signs the market is cooling and buyers should be cautious. If the economy softens, as expected, it will be an inauspicious time to be over-extended.

The central bank, CMHC and mortgage lenders, particularly the chartered banks, along with government, should keep a sharp eye on the housing market and apply their best efforts to ensuring home ownership continues to be the best way for most Canadians to attain financial security.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Roadblocks could delay, or even kill, planned ParaYso Hotel

Bruce Constantineau
Sun

Graham Alexander wants to build downtown Vancouver‘s newest boutique hotel — a 14-storey, 91-suite development on a site now occupied by a vacant retail building at 620 Seymour Street.

He even has a name for the $27-million proposal — the ParaYso Hotel Vancouver.

Alexander is president and majority owner of Rancho Santa Monica Developments, which recently bought the Seymour property from Taiwanese owners for $5.5 million.

“It’s the perfect time for a project like this,” he said in an interview. “Downtown hotel occupancy levels are around 71 or 72 per cent, and the after-boom of the Olympics should make things even stronger.”

Alexander proposes to begin construction by the summer of 2009, with completion by the summer of 2011.

But there are potential roadblocks that could delay or even kill the project. Alexander needs to raise about $7.7 million over the next year to make the deal work, and he’s trying to do that through a limited partnership and a share issue.

He also needs city approval, and planners say the project still requires considerable analysis and design work before it can proceed.

“Given the small size of this site, there will be challenges with respect to proposed use, parking, height, massing and possibly other issues,” city development planner Bob Adair said in an e-mail Friday.

The site has 15.24 metres (50 feet) of frontage on Seymour Street.

Alexander, a former stockbroker who completed a 32-lot residential project in Chilliwack in 2006 and a hotel development in Tulum, Mexico last year, said he wanted to include a residential component in the Seymour project, but the city has a moratorium on condo projects in that part of town.

He said he still hopes to increase the number of floors and hotel rooms in the project.

If it goes ahead, the ParaYso Hotel would be one of the few hotel-only projects to be built in the city in several years. Two other Vancouver boutique hotels under construction — the Loden (opening this summer) and the Shangri-La (opening early next year) — are part of major mixed-use condo/hotel developments.

Vancouver hotel industry consultant Angus Wilkinson said the 600-block Seymour is an “evolving location”, and not one that would obviously attract upscale boutique hotel customers.

“That whole area is still in a state of redevelopment. And with just 91 units, I don’t know how you make the numbers work to make it an economic proposition,” he said. “It’s hard to make an economic case for anything under 100 rooms.”

Wilkinson noted economic realities have forced restaurateur Umberto Menghi to delay or abandon his plan to build a 16-storey, 40-unit hotel next to his Il Giardino restaurant on Hornby Street.

A proposed first-year budget for the ParaYso Hotel forecasts monthly occupancy rates ranging from 68 to 92 per cent, and average room rates ranging from $200 to $265.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Housing starts up for first quarter despite decline in permits

Derrick Penner
Sun

Signs of an extension to B.C.’s construction boom continue to mount, even though first-quarter building permits have waned.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported a gain in housing starts across the province during the first four months of the year compared with the same period a year ago.

In addition, the province reported that work began on 26 major projects worth some $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2008, pushing the overall number of large construction projects underway in B.C. to 399, worth almost $61 billion, up from the $57.4 billion in work underway during the fourth quarter of 2007.

Developers also piled an additional 61 projects, worth $10.6 billion, on to its Major Projects Inventory, bringing the total number of large projects in planning or under construction to 858, worth $163.2 billion.

Earlier this week, Statistics Canada reported a slowing in the number of building permits issued, with $2.7 billion worth of permits handed out in B.C. during the first quarter of 2008, down eight per cent from the same period in 2007.

However, watching the number of projects build is encouraging to Philip Hochstein, president of the Independent Contractors and Business Association of B.C.

“The major projects inventory figures are important because they show there is confidence in B.C. long after the Olympics,” Hochstein said in a news release.

And housing starts across B.C., while down in April in communities such as Nanaimo, Kamloops, Kelowna and Prince George, remain just over 13-per-cent ahead of 2007 levels at 11,391 units after the first four months of the year.

Big chunks of that gain came from the Vancouver and Abbotsford metropolitan regions, which witnessed housing starts 16 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively, higher than 2007 after the first four months.

“If we look at last year, 2007 was the strongest year [for housing starts] since 1993, and this year we’re on pace to exceed that,” Peter Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association said.

Even if starts fall off over the remaining eight months of the year, the beginning is “still a very good sign [that] construction is still going very strong.”

New developments are also showing strong sales. The development firm Adera, this week, reported the sell out of 104 units in the first phase of its spa-centred Salus development at Scott Road and 66th Avenue in Surrey to early registrants before the project’s official public opening Saturday.

The developer has decided to release an additional phase early, and Simpson added that such pre-sales bode well for future starts.

However, there are still indicators that the overall housing market is slowing, Tsur Somerville, director of urban economics and real estate at the Sauder School of Business at the University of B.C.

Metro Vancouver saw 1,560 new-home starts in April, bringing the total to 6,691 at the end of April. Some 5,552 of those were multi-family starts — either condominiums or townhouses — and Somerville added that if it weren’t for a big increase in the City of Vancouver‘s multi-family starts the overall number would be down from the same period in 2007.

And while starts were higher in Vancouver, Surrey, North Vancouver City, Coquitlam, Burnaby and Delta, they were down in Langley, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows and all the other Metro Vancouver communities.

Somerville added that sales across the region have slowed, as have the gains in price increases.

“The fact that [housing starts] are up so far to date, I’m not reading too much into that,” he said.

Canada‘s housing market showed further signs of slipping as the pace of new-home construction eased last month, dropping by a greater-than-expected 12 per cent to a seasonally adjusted rate of 213,900, the federal housing agency reported Thursday.

The data follows two other reports this week showing a softening in Canada‘s housing boom, with building permits falling 4.5 per cent in March, according to Statistics Canada, and existing home sales expected to slow by 11.5 per cent this year, as reported by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008