If you are planning to rent a suite or room for the games, you should be organizing right now.

Ozzie Jurock
Other

The samples above, captured online last month, give an indication of the potential income for Vancouver and Whistler homeowners willing and able to rent out all or some of their property during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Paralympic Games, held February 12 to 28, 2010.

If you are planning to rent a suite or room for the games, you should be organizing right now. In February, NBC and CTV began heavily promoting Vancouver Olympics TV coverage, which should start the phones ringing for visitor accommodation.

Some of the 5,500 Olympic athletes, or their teams, will rent out private homes close to venues to escape the distraction of the Olympic village, while international media crews will need large houses or apartments. Most of these bookings will already have been made, or will be firmed up shortly, but visitor accommodations will be booked over the next year, likely right up to the opening ceremonies.

Average asking rent: $915 per night !

The average Olympic rental in the Vancouver area is a two-bedroom suite, and the average asking rental rate is $915 per night. Homes with more than four bedrooms show an average rent of $1,248 per night, according to Mark Szekely, who surveyed nearly 200 listings on his rent2010.net web page. In Whistler, the average asking rental rate, by bedroom, is $478 per day. Multiply by the 16 days of the Games, and you can see it can be worthwhile renting out the home, or at least a room or two.

Unlike in Salt Lake City, the last winter Olympics held in North America, there is no official rental program set up to list or monitor private rental accommodation for the 2010 Olympics.

Since there is no official Olympic visitor rental site, it is hard to know whether potential landlords are achieving the rents asked, says Bob Mackie, 2010 Olympic columnist for Business in Vancouver.

Mackie says there is a concern in the Olympic community that if rents appear too high, some visitors may forego the games. “But there will be no way of knowing until the Olympics actually start.”

The best advice could be to offer your Olympic rental at below the average asking rate to generate increased interest. Szekely recommends setting up a permanent listing on paid sites, such as rent210.net, with photos and information, and using the free Craigslist to direct traffic to it.

CHECK LOCAL BYLAWS

If you are planning on adding a rental suite to your home in time for the Olympics, be sure you are within local bylaws. At Whistler, the municipality has eased regulations to allow short-term rentals of commercial property to accommodate VANOC staff, but there is no plan to allow private homeowners to rent out their property nightly for Olympic visitors. Currently, such private rentals are restricted to a 60-day minimum.

In Vancouver, secondary suites in private homes have been allowed since 2004, and there are no restrictions on nightly rentals, but it may be wise to warn your neighbours.

Based on a look at properties being listed for rent, through sites such as 2010destinationplanner.com and craigslist.org, the selection extends right across Greater Vancouver, and includes condominiums, complete houses, single rooms, and self-contained rental suites in private houses.

The potential of making $10,000 to $30,000 in rental income during the Olympics may be impetus enough for local homeowners to go ahead with a rental suite in their home. As a ballpark, you could expect from $100 to $150 per square foot to add a rental suite in a basement, and even more for upscale finishing. Remember also, that the Olympic short-term rental will have to be offered fully furnished.

Renovating a primary residence to add a rental suite is a good way of boosting the resale value, adding value on which you don’t have to pay capital gains tax. Moreover, if you derive rental income from the renovated property, you may be eligible for a variety of tax deductions that will accelerate the return you see from the property.

Some of you may even be thinking of renting out your boat. Well, you can’t – at least not at the Coal Harbor Marina – you can have guests but you need to be there too.

The Olympics may have not driven up real estate prices … but they sure have an effect on rentals.

Alan Zibel
USA Today

WASHINGTON — Home prices fell in nearly nine out of every 10 U.S. cities in the first quarter of this year as first-time buyers looking for bargains dominated the market.

The National Association of Realtors said Tuesday that median sales prices of existing homes declined in 134 out of 152 metropolitan areas compared with the same period a year ago. Prices rose in the other 18 cities.

Nationwide, sales of foreclosures and other distressed properties made up about half of the market.

Home sales fell in all but six states —Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida, Virginia and Minnesota— where buyers have been able to snap up foreclosures at a deep discount.

Sales more than doubled in Nevada, rose 81% in California and grew 50% in Arizona — signaling that the worst may be over for those distressed states.

Still, the median sales price nationwide was $169,900, down 13.8% from a year ago. The median price is the midpoint, which means half of the homes sold for more and half for less.

The biggest drop, of more than 50%, was in Fort Myers, Fla. Prices fell 40% or more in Saginaw, Mich.; Akron, Ohio; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif; Phoenix; Sarasota, Fla; and Riverside, Calif.

The biggest price gain, of more than 21%, was in Cumberland, Md.. The only other double-digit increase was in Davenport, Iowa, which saw the median price climb nearly 14%.

Lawrence Yun, the trade group’s chief economist, said the $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers included in the economic stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year should boost sales.

“We expect a measurable increase in home sales during the second half of the year, which would help stabilize prices in most areas,” Yun said in a statement.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

New report also sees 2009 starts in B.C. halved

Province

New home prices in Vancouver posted Canada‘s second-sharpest decline in March, Statistics Canada says.

Prices in Vancouver fell 1.1 per cent in March, just behind a 1.2-per-cent drop in each of Calgary and Edmonton, StatsCan said yesterday.

Victoria, where new home prices fell 0.9 per cent in March, tied with St. Catharines-Niagara for Canada‘s third-steepest decrease, the federal agency said.

“In Vancouver and Victoria, builders reported lower prices due to competition and slow market conditions,” StatsCan said.

“In Calgary and Edmonton, declines were attributed to lower material and labour costs and lower lot prices from developers.”

New house prices in Vancouver have fallen by 7.8 per cent from a year ago, StatsCan said. Victoria‘s have sunk by 6.6 per cent.

Nationally, new home prices fell for the sixth straight month in March as the country’s real-estate market continued to weaken amid the economic downturn.

Average prices dropped 0.5 per cent during the month, compared with a 0.7-per-cent drop in February.

The March decline was in line with analysts’ forecasts.

For the year, new home prices were down 2.4 per cent in March, compared with a year-over-year decline of 1.8 per cent in February.

Monthly prices also were in decline in Saskatoon, off 0.7 per cent, Charlottetown, down 0.4 per cent, Toronto, down 0.3 per cent and Hamilton, Ont., off 0.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, prices rose in St. John’s, N.L., which posted a 0.4-per-cent increase and Montreal, where they climbed 0.3 per cent.

Economist Millan Mulraine of TD Securities said “the continued drop in new home prices is a reflection of the overall weakness in the Canadian housing market.

“The weak domestic economic conditions and soft labour-market conditions continue to sap housing demand,” Mulraine added.

In a separate report, Altus Group predicted housing starts in B.C. will fall from 34,321 last year to 17,553 in 2009, rising slightly to 20,425 in 2010.

On Friday, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said the number of national housing starts fell to 117,400 in April from 146,500 in March.

© Copyright (c) The Province

There are more than 7,000 unsold new homes in Metro Vancouver

Brian Morton
Sun

Homebuilder Dale Barron says major price reductions earlier this year have translated into his Coquitlam-based company’s best sales months on record.

But now the owner of Morningstar Homes is raising prices on those single-family houses — although not nearly as high as 2008 levels.

“Three of the first four months [of 2009] were the best sales months in the history of our company,” Barron said Monday. “In January, we sold 21. In February, we sold 13. In March, 21. And in April, 20. In the last quarter of last year, we sold about 12 homes.

“I now have no finished, unsold inventory. We’re selling faster than I can build them. I’m selling homes that will be occupied next March.”

Statistics Canada reported Monday that Metro Vancouver saw a 1.1-per-cent decline in prices for new homes in March from the previous month, and a 7.8-per-cent decline since March 2008.

The declines were far greater than the national average, which saw prices for new homes fall 0.5 per cent for the month and 2.4 per cent in the year.

Barron said that when the real estate market went flat in 2008, he got together with partners and associates to work out ways to reduce costs at his current housing sites in Coquitlam and Delta.

He believes that the StatsCan survey is largely a reflection that many other developers were slow to drop prices earlier this year, and are only now starting to do so.

“We talked to our trades, suppliers, bankers, lawyers and partners in terms of having to lower our prices significantly,” added Barron. “We said we can either make bread-and-butter wages and push through this, or hold back, lay everybody off, and wait. We renegotiated contracts and went back to the manufacturers, who reduced prices for [such things as] siding and carpeting.”

Reducing travel distances and idling times for construction trucks alone saved the company a total of about $5,000 on each home, he added.

Barron said cost-cutting measures and efficiencies allowed Morningstar to drop the price of their homes by about $100,000 — enough to bring buyers back into the market.

Since then, he added, prices have gone up about $30,000, “to allow our trades and suppliers to make a modest profit.”

Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association [GVHBA] chief executive officer Peter Simpson said that the StatsCan survey results are not surprising, but that things are starting to turn around.

He noted that prices for all homes in the Lower Mainland area rose 45 per cent between 2005 and 2007.

“Prices went up pretty heavily here, so to drop [eight per cent] isn’t surprising. And builders have standing inventory, so it makes sense to reduce prices, sell homes and get them off the books. It’s creating some pretty sweet deals for people looking for a home.”

Simpson also said that many builders are already starting to plan their next projects.

According to the survey, the drop in new home prices was led by declines in Western Canada, with the biggest declines in Calgary and Edmonton.

“In Vancouver and Victoria, builders reported lower prices due to competition and slow market conditions.” the report stated.

Victoria prices dropped 0.9 per cent from February to March and 6.6 per cent since March 2008.

Tsur Somerville, director of the Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate at the University of B.C.‘s Sauder School of Business, said in an interview that he is not surprised at Vancouver‘s new home price drop.

“We had a much larger price runup and had prices that got more out of line with fundamentals.”

Jennifer Podmore Russell, managing director of MPC Intelligence, a research firm for new home construction, said in an interview that there are now 7,081 homes in Metro Vancouver either under construction or completed and unsold.

She said the 1,500 that are completed and unsold are far more than the 500 homes completed and unsold at the end of 2006, but far less than the 4,500 completed and unsold at the end of 1999.

“The inventory is absolutely up from the height of the market in 2004, 2005 and 2006, but still well below what we experienced in the ’80s and ’90s.

“And the most significant decline in prices, I believe, is over.”

Podmore Russell said there’s now about a 20-month supply of available new housing, meaning that if homes keep selling at today’s pace they will all be sold in 20 months. “That 20-month [supply] is not that much in historical terms.”

Meanwhile, builders started work on 483 new homes across Metro Vancouver in April, down almost 70 per cent from the same period last year.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

 

Brian Morton
Sun

Vancouver saw a 1.1-per-cent decline in prices for new homes in March from the previous month and a 7.8-per-cent decline since March 2008, Statistics Canada reported Monday.

The declines were far greater than the national average, which saw prices for new homes fall 0.5 per cent for the month and 2.4 per cent in the year.

However, Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association [GVHBA] chief executive officer Peter Simpson said in an interview that the survey results are not surprising and that things are starting to turn around.

“Prices went up pretty heavily here, so to drop [eight per cent] isn’t surprising. And builders have standing inventory, so it makes sense to reduce prices, sell homes and get them off the books. It’s creating some pretty sweet deals for people looking for a home.”

Simpson also said that a lot of builders’ standing inventory has been “reduced and eliminated,” and that many are already starting to plan their next projects.

According to the survey, the drop in new home prices was led by declines in Western Canada, with the biggest declines in Calgary and Edmonton.

“In Vancouver and Victoria, builders reported lower prices due to competition and slow market conditions.” the report stated.

“In Calgary and Edmonton, declines were attributed to lower material and labour costs and lower lot prices from developers.”

Victoria prices dropped 0.9 per cent from February to March and 6.6 per cent since March 2008. Prices also declined in St. Catharines–Niagara, Ont., down 0.9 per cent, Saskatoon, off -0.7 per cent, Charlottetown, down 0.4 per cent, Toronto, down 0.3 per cent and Hamilton, Ont., off 0.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, prices rose in St. John’s, N.L., which posted a 0.4 per cent increased. Montreal prices were up 0.3 per cent and Quebec gained 0.1 per cent.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Pleasantly in Mount Pleasant

Michael sasges
Sun

Afelicitous response by developer and architect to The Block’s location makes this townhouse development an exemplary addition to the Vancouver residency opportunity.

The Block’s exterior metal cladding and brickwork broadcast location in an original Vancouver neighbourhood, Mount Pleasant, with a history as much industrial as residential.

The decks on the townhouses’s roofs broadcast higher-ground location. (The 50-metre elevation runs through the property.) The views of the downtown high-rises, commercial and residential, and the North Shore mountains will lure Block households to their roofs in all months in good weather and keep them there in a glorious July or August.

“Where in the city can a woman put on a bikini and lay out on a chaise lounge without people staring at her? I’d be up there all summer,’’ says Cristy Edmonds, the general sales manager at ParkLane Homes, an observation she shared in answering a question, tell Vancouver Sun readers your favourite feature in the townhouses.

The organizer of the Block sales and marketing campaign, ParkLane marketing manager Krista Shirreff, advances as her favourite a feature three floors below the decks, the private, secured passage between 25 of the 32 townhouses and the common parking garage.

‘‘Lugging your groceries into an elevator and down a hallway is not the best of times,’’ says Shirreff, an apartment resident herself. ‘‘ Here it’s almost like you have your own little single family home. You can drive in, you’re safe and secure in your own parkade and, boom, you’re right upstairs in your own kitchen unloading your groceries.’’

Every household will have its own front door, either on the street, Guelph Street or East 11th, or the courtyard that is a common feature of newer Vancouver townhouse developments.

Nineteen of the townhouses front on the courtyard and, therefore, face each other.

Nine of the townhouses front on Guelph Street and, across the street, the almost-100-year-old Nightingale elementary school.

Four of the townhouses front on East 11th.

Not only righteous possession of site makes The Block worth seeing.

Possession of a novel quality makes it worth knowing about: it is the first newhome project in Vancouver in ParkLane’s history – more than 5,500 homes, and more than 250 provincial and national awards, in almost 30 years.

ParkLane is firstly and primarily a suburban tract-home developer. More than that, it develops whole neighbourhoods of which Heritage Woods in Port Moody is the leading example. Westcoast Homes reporters were probably visiting the new-home community twice a year a few years back.

The Block, therefore, is a small project for ParkLane. But it’s an important, maybe critical, undertaking on the cusp of the company’s fourth decade.

In that decade it will turn almost 130 acres in Vancouver’s southeast corner into a multi-residence neighbourhood called, by all involved, East Fraserlands.

‘‘I think definitely moving into the multi-family business is something ParkLane wanted to do from a corporate perspective before we moved on to the Fraser lands,’’ Krista Shirreff says. ‘‘It’s something very different.’’

ParkLane has not yet opened the Block sales centre and show home to the general public, Shirreff advises. To visit either, contact sales manager Jenny Wun at the telephone number or email address published in the information box at the start of the story.

 

Bob Ransford
Sun

The City of Vancouver should guarantee condo prices for a quick post-Olympic sell-off of the Olympic Village development. That’s one idea being floated in the development community.

Experienced developers have already stepped forward and offered the City advice as the Olympic Village project races toward completion and the realities of bringing this one-of-a-kind condo project to market post-Olympics fast approach.

The city faces some formidable challenges. It is holding the bag for the entire development, guaranteeing on-time completion and arranging the project financing for a project where costs are now topping $1 billion when many are questioning whether $1 billion worth of new home product will exist upon completion.

The idea of a guarantee is one worth considering as the city looks for ways to use its unique position as the backer of the project to provide the kind of confidence in the new-home marketplace that could allow for a quick sell-out of the 850 market condo units after the Olympics are over.

The idea is that after the Olympics, the city would back the sale of all remaining condo units.

Buyers would be offered a three-year price guarantee backed by the city of Vancouver. The guarantee would be for 90 per cent of the sale price.

If the market deteriorates over the three-year period, an original owner would be entitled to compensation when their home is resold in an arm’s length transaction.

Basically, the city would be making a bold statement of confidence in Vancouver‘s medium-term housing market and in the success of this model project.

It is hard to estimate just how many of the 850 units will remain unsold given that pre-sales that occurred up until recently were based on prices sustained in a much higher market.

Offering a guarantee to future buyers would certainly have an impact on those who already agreed to pay higher prices.

Some contracts might be enforceable and others may disappear. In short, the guarantee program would be establishing a new market for all of the Olympic Village market condos.

What would the city be risking in offering such a guarantee?

Basically, it would be risking that prices might drop more than 10 per cent within three years. It may be a risk worth taking considering that with current market prices and the total cost of building the homes, it is going to be a stretch for the city to recoup what it invested in the project together with the $200 million in land value it promised taxpayers it would return to the city’s once lucrative property endowment fund.

What the guarantee promises is the kind of stabilization and a stimulation of buyer activity that come with the confidence that such a scheme offers. It promises to attract a small wave of buyers over a short period of time–just the kind of thing that will help mitigate the city’s carrying costs on the project and produce other important benefits.

One of those benefits is the opportunity to significantly kick-start the 80-acre Southeast False Creek neighbourhood that promises to be one of Vancouver‘s best and one of the world’s most innovative neighbourhoods. Imagine if nothing happens on the site for months or even years after the Olympics are over.

Sure, the city can always try to rent the vacant condo homes. Market rents for these prime waterfront units will not be cheap.

How many renters will the city be able to attract? To what extent will the cash flow from the rentals cover the city’s carrying costs and the opportunity costs of not recouping at least the land value?

There are other huge risks, though, in turning to the rental market as the short-term solution.

Once a large proportion of the homes are rented, the community is no longer a condominium community with new-home value.

Market value is immediately eroded once a condo unit goes on the market. Once an entire neighbourhood is rental it is perceived as a very different neighbourhood from a mixed-use neighbourhood. So, the renting option is a risky one.

Do nothing and leave the units vacant until the market returns is an even riskier proposition.

The neighbourhood would no longer be sustainable.

How would the mix of retail and community services survive if the condos sit empty?

What would such a lag mean for the entire area, of which half of the 80-acre area is owned by private developers waiting for the Olympic Village to come online as the heart of a new urban neighbourhood.

The fact that the city is so intimately involved in the project – far beyond the normal exposure of governments that sell land for development – could prove to be the saving grace for the city in overcoming the multiple challenges of rescuing the taxpayer investment in this project and creating a whole new model neighbourhood.

What do you think?

– – –

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with CounterPoint Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. E-mail: [email protected]

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun