Metro Vancouver commercial real estate slows
Charlie Smith
The Georgia Straight
It’s not just residential real-estate agents who are feeling the pinch of slower sales in Vancouver these days.
The commercial market also also seen a significant drop in transactions, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.
In the first three months of 2018, there was a 10.8 percent fall in its territory, which includes Squamish, Whistler, and most of the Lower Mainland, but not Surrey, Langley, White Rock, and North Delta.
The dollar volume fell 38.5 percent in the first quarter from $4.93 billion last year to $3.03 billion this year.
“Our commercial market returned to more historically normal levels in the first quarter of the year compared to the heightened activity we experienced in 2017,” REBGV president Phil Moore said in a news release. “This shift to more typical activity is mirroring the overall economic trends we’re seeing in our province today.
The dollar volume of land sales in the first quarter dipped 20.5 percent, whereas the dollar volume of office and retail sales crashed by 51 percent.
Dollar volume of industrial sales was off 12.2 percent.
Multifamily sales saw an 81.5 percent decrease in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year.
This comes not long after the REBGV released its May statistics for residential real estate sales. They indicated that home sales fell by 35.1 percent over the same period in 2017.
Meanwhile, B.C.’s NDP government is forecasting growing revenues from real-estate transactions.
Its recent budget predicted $2.22 billion in property-transfer taxes this fiscal year, rising to $2.25 billion in in 2019-20 and to $2.31 billion in 2020-21.
© 2018 Vancouver free press
