Derrick Penner
Sun
Renee Tillmanns and her son Logan, 4, outside their Langley Township home that sold for $495,000, slightly above the Multiple Listing Service average price of $490,354 for the neighbourhood in April. Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
A bucolic chunk of Langley Township is the Lower Mainland’s hottest real-estate neighbourhood, a place where average prices are actually higher now than a year ago, says realty firm Century 21.
The rural utopia of horse paddocks and pastures came out tops in the company’s research on the best-performing areas in the Lower Mainland for real estate prices.
The neighbourhood was one of three that recorded year-over-year price gains in April. The other two were Coal Harbour in Vancouver and a section of Richmond.
Langley Century 21 realtor Sukh Kang said the area’s high performance is “probably because of the acreages.”
Acreage properties, homes with some room to move around in, have been moving in the area, Kang said, commanding higher prices than in the past from buyers who can pay a little more for the tranquillity.
Rural peace drew Renee and Robert Tillmanns to their first home, a tidy house on one-third of an acre in Tall Timbers Estates eight years ago.
“It’s nice and quiet, there’s not a lot of traffic,” Renee Tillmanns said in an interview. “I’ve never lived in town, I’ve always lived out in the country. I like the kids [boys ages four and six] to be able to run around.”
The Tillmanns recently sold their house, not for the initial asking price of $550,000, but for $495,000, which is above the Multiple Listing Service average price of $490,354 for the neighbourhood in April.
The average price in the neighbourhood was 16-per-cent higher in April than in March, and 12-per-cent higher than the $437,041 average recorded in April 2008.
“The message for homeowners is that Canada‘s housing markets are comprised of thousands of individual neighbourhoods that often perform differently from average prices in their cities or their provinces or the country,” Century 21 president Don Lawby said in a news release.
Century 21’s research examined price performance within Canada Post forward sorting areas — which it considers to be the equivalent of large neighbourhoods — where there were 30 or more property sales.
Some 44 areas qualified by having the requisite number of sales.
The top three areas were:
– An area of Langley Township between 56th Avenue and 62nd Avenue and 196th Street and 248th Street.
– An area of Richmond bounded by No. 5 Road and Westminster Highway, where the average price of $448,469 in April was 15 per cent higher than in March and up 3.43 per cent from April 2008.
– An area of downtown Vancouver Century 21 defined as Coal Harbour, which stretches from Hastings Street to English Bay in the south and between Burrard and Broughton Streets. There, April’s average price of $561,198 was 15-per-cent higher than the average recorded in March and 0.34-per-cent higher than in the same month a year ago.
Of the 44 neighbourhoods surveyed, 25 saw prices increase from March to April, though they still showed losses year-over-year.
Of the top 10, three neighbourhoods were in Vancouver; others were in Port Moody, Burnaby, Abbotsford, Mission and Port Coquitlam.
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