Renewed interest in townhouses may solve missing middle

Neil Sharma
Canadian Real Estate Wealth

Speculation tax a failure, critics contend

Andrew Duffy
Western Investor

Speculation tax a failure, critics contend

Andrew Duffy
Western Investor

InterRent, Crestpoint pay $292.5M in Vancouver rental deal

Frank O’Brien
Western Investor

Burnaby industrial site worth $9.3 million per acre

Macdonald Commercial
Western Investor

Type of property: Industrial

Location: 3210 Lake City Way, Burnaby, B.C.

Size of property: 38,208 square feet

Land size: 57,456 square feet

Land size, in acres: 1.32 acres

BC Assessment value 2020: $10.5 million

Listing price: $12.9 million

Sale price: $12.25 million

Date of sale: December 31, 2020

Brokerages: Macdonald Commercial, Vancouver; Cushman Wakefield, Vancouver.

Brokers: Nick Goulet and Stuart Wright, Macdonald Commercial and Sean Ungemach,

Cushman Wakefield.

 

© Copyright 2020 Western Investor

December home sales surprisingly up

Tiffany Crawford
The Province

Province will administer all homeowner grants and sets this year’s threshold at $1.625M

Tiffany Crawford
The Province

The B.C. government is taking over administration of homeowner grants from municipalities, and announced Tuesday that this year’s grant threshold is set at $1.625 million.

The province already administers the grant for rural homeowners. Homeowners in all municipalities will now submit applications to the B.C. government instead of their municipal office.

Applications will open in May when a majority of property tax notices are received.

The B.C. Finance Ministry is reminding homeowners to keep their property assessment notice or property tax notice from their municipality because they will need their roll and jurisdiction number to apply for the grant.

The grant is reduced by $5 for every $1,000 of assessed value above the threshold. Some low-income seniors, veterans and people with disabilities can also apply for a supplement that replaces any grant amount they lose because the value of their home is over the threshold.

The grant amounts for 2021 for homeowners in Metro Vancouver, and the Fraser

Valley Regional and Capital Regional districts are up to $570 for the basic grant, and up to $845 for homeowners who are 65 or older, or if the homeowner or a person they live with has a disability.

For northern or rural areas, the grants are up to $770, or up to $1,045 for homes where the homeowner is 65 years or older or the homeowner is a person with a disability.

Homeowners may also be eligible for property tax deferment if they’re 55 or older, or are financially supporting a dependent child.

 

© 2021 The Province

Vancouver housing market ends 2020 on fire, shatters December sales record

Sean MacKay
Livabl

 Despite the tighter measures put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, Vancouver home buyers scooped up a record number of properties during what’s typically a quiet period for housing activity in December.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver today announced that 3,093 homes sold across the Vancouver region last month, a 53.4 percent increase over the same period in 2019 and a record for the month of December. Sales even slightly outperformed November 2020’s total even with December’s long stretch of holidays.

Housing Market News Alerts

Sign up now for news alerts on the Vancouver housing market

“Robust December sales outpaced long-term averages in what’s traditionally the quietest month of the year in real estate. This was part of an unusual seasonal pattern the market followed last year, which can be attributed in large part to the pandemic,” said REBGV President Colette Gerber.

With the book now closed on 2020, REBGV also reported that total home sales for the year, 30,944, were over 20 percent higher than totals achieved in 2019 and 2018 and only slightly below the 10-year average.

It’s an impressive feat considering how few homes were sold during the early months of the pandemic.

“When the pandemic began in March, the housing market came to a near standstill. We knew, however, that shelter needs don’t go away in times of crisis, they intensify,” said Gerber.

She went on to applaud real estate professionals’ work with public health and other regulatory bodies to ensure precautions and protocols were swiftly implemented so buyers and sellers could continue to transact safely through the pandemic.

Gerber noted that changing homebuyer preferences and low interest rates drove demand in 2020, but looking ahead, it will be the supply of homes on the market that will shape activity and price trends for 2021.

Home prices continued their steady upward climb across all property types in the final month of 2020.

The benchmark price of a detached home was $1,554,600, up over 10 percent from a year earlier. Condo apartment prices rose 2.6 percent from a year ago to a benchmark of $676,500. Attached homes recorded a 4.9 percent benchmark price increase, rising to $813,900.

 

© 2020 BuzzBuzzHome Corp.

Buying or selling – key projections for Canadian real estate in 2021

Clayton Jarvis
Mortgage Broker News

CONDO CONUNDRUM

Steve Kupferman
other

Until recently, a condominium apartment in Toronto was a near- foolproof investment. And then came March 2020, and COVID- 19.

Since the start of the pandemic, resale condos in Toronto and other Canadian cities have tended to stagnate in value, even as prices of other housing types have stabilized or surged. As the year ends, and with post- pandemic life in sight, real estate watchers are wondering: what will it take for condo markets to return to normal?

There are a few prevailing theories as to why many of Canada’s urban condo markets have struggled during the pandemic. All of these theories revolve around the ways COVID- 19 has changed life in cities.

The collapse of the short- term rental market is one likely culprit.

“People had these investment properties that they were renting out as ghost hotels on Airbnb,” says Scott Ingram, a Toronto real estate agent. “And then all of sudden the pandemic happens and their revenue goes to zero. Then you get a flood of long- term rentals.”

While long- term rental supply was increasing, virus- related travel restrictions were decimating immigration to Canada, diminishing the pool of potential tenants.

And then there was the work from- home factor, which may have caused some downtown dwellers to rethink plans to live, or continue living, in tiny apartments. In Ontario, as of 2017, the median size of a newly built condo apartment was just 665 square feet.

Canada’s condo markets have been affected in different ways. In Vancouver, November’s modest condo price increases were outshone by detached homes, which notched double- digit percentage year- over- year gains. In Montreal, condo sales volumes and median prices this fall have actually outpaced 2019, but single- family homes have been appreciating in value much more quickly. In Calgary, condos posted a year- over year decline in average resale value in November, even as the prices of semis and detached homes climbed.

But no Canadian condo market has felt the effects of the pandemic more sharply than that of Toronto. The toll of the virus is best explained in terms of “months of inventory” — a measurement of the number of months it would take to sell every condo currently on the market, if the current number of buyers were to remain the same.

For four years, beginning in 2016, the Toronto resale condo market was chronically undersupplied. The availability of resale condos bottomed out in March 2017, at 0.6 months of inventory. For the next few years, Toronto almost never had more than two months of condo inventory. But all that changed in April, the first full month after the onset of the pandemic. The city’s condo market instantly accumulated nearly four months of inventory, as listings increased. At the end of November, new listings continued to outstrip demand.

The buildup in inventory has been particularly significant in Toronto’s downtown, where condo apartment supply, as of the end of November, was higher than the city average, at 4.7 months of inventory. The average resale price of a condo in the core was down nearly eight per cent, year- overyear. Citywide, average condo prices were down three per cent, even as other housing types made impressive gains. For instance, in the city’s 905 suburbs, where housing markets have been especially buoyant this fall, the average price of a detached home was up 19.2 per cent, year- over- year.

If the first round of vaccines is widespread and effective enough to stop all the COVID- 19 related headwinds from blowing, it’s likely, some argue, that urban Canada’s resale condo markets will stop lagging other types of housing.

“Once things go back to normal and you’re not so nervous to be in an elevator with someone, I can’t see how this trend isn’t going to reverse itself,” says Shaun Cathcart, senior economist at the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Cathcart also points out that the current condo situation only looks dire in comparison to the heated condo- market conditions of early 2020. “We were looking at the tightest market conditions almost ever,” he says. “There’s a lot of runway for those conditions to unwind before they become problematic.”

The Toronto condo market may have been particularly vulnerable because of its high levels of investor activity. A 2018 analysis by the real estate research firm Urbanation found that 48 per cent of newly completed condo units in the Greater Toronto Area were sold to people who intended to hold them as investments and rent them out, rather than live in them.

John Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty, has noticed signs that investors are already beginning to return to the Toronto condo market. “We’ve seen a big turnaround in the past six weeks or so,” he says. “Big demand and interest from investors who are looking at the decline in prices in the downtown core and seeing that as a buying opportunity. Condos that were sitting on the market for a while are suddenly selling really quickly.”

Royal LePage expects Toronto condo prices to eke out 0.5 per cent gains in 2021, compared to a 5.75 per cent average gain across the city’s different property segments. Condos are also expected to underperform other segments in Vancouver and Montreal.

“The huge baby boomer demographic began post- children migration to suburban and recreational- style communities in the middle of the last decade, and material numbers of the equally populous millennial generation have been exiting city centre condos in search of space as they began families,” Phil Soper, CEO of Royal LePage, said in a Dec. 14 forecast.

 

© Copyright 2020 Canada News