tuesday mass debate - housing prices - vancouver a bubble or just expensive

Foreign Buyer Tax, Vacancy Tax, Speculation Tax, despite all these things, prices keep going up.  Is Vancouver a bubble are just so desirable that folks will pay these (and higher) prices forever?

Why can't it be both?

For decades people have said Vancouver’s bubble will burst one day. Has it?

This thread is useless without Pedro2005

I remember back in the '80's (no, really) when the WSJ called the Vancouver housing market a "casino".

Posted by: FLATCH

For decades people have said Vancouver’s bubble will burst one day. Has it?

When the economy is bad, interest rates go down and housing prices go up (just happened) . The economy is good, prices go up even with interest rates on the rise. So have to say no to the bubble thing. I sat around years back waiting for this so called bubble to burst....Said screw it and bought in, since then prices have been on the rise, pretty much doubled...That was 12 years ago.

The national deficits, for last year, in the industrialized nations was staggering. This year is going to be bad too.

When Covid is out of the picture, the economies will pick up but that debt has to be paid. There's no way that interest rates are going up while all the rich countries have to service their debts.

70's n 80's it wasnt too hard to lose money on the RE but things have gone  up in vangroovy year after year  thanx to the money laundering schemes as engineered by Rich and Christie,

if you were in the game good for you, otherwise you are fucked if you want to own a home so maybe move narth

but now housing going crazy up here in narthern BC, people buying houses on the internet site unseen, my assessment  went way up

It was just a matter of time before it got you XXX. The "deals" keep getting farther from the big smoke. What I wonder is how many people that work remotely will buy something in small town BC to live the dream only to realize that their dream only comes with 3 restaurants (1 that is any good and all of them are closed on Sunday) and then migrate back toward the Lower Mainleand. The slow life is not for everyone.

IMO there has to be an element of global demand, money laundering, speculating, etc, but I the housing supply is still lagging behind demand so... Having said that, my opinion is as reliable as a magic 8 ball.

The RE prices are being driven by multiple things, CGL/Bruce Jack/ CNR/ I bought 11 yars ago in a downturn and I became an LL in a tight rental market so it didn't get me. Most people who move here dig the cheaper living, the outdoor things and they learn to cook

Starting to think about moving back home to the Sunshine Coast. Been sniffing around but there isn’t much inventory unless you head north towards Egmont. Pretty easy to sell in the valley right now. I live in upper Mission and nothing in my hood is on the market more than a week.

Expensive, like every other great place to live in the world. My thought is also that Vancouver is only even considered expensive because local salaries are not as high as other "expensive" places to live in the world. Im not sure the rest of the world thinks Vancouver is as expensive to live in as locals do.

It might fluctuate around the mean, but Vancouver will likely stay expensive. I think that salaries will adjust. A 100 year mortgage is not uncommon in Europe. People from all over the world want to live in Vancouver so if there is an adjustment that changes Vancouvers realestate versus elsewhere, theyll flood in and stabilize the market.

For example, do you think that Toronto will overtake Vancouver in real estate prices? Do you think that Vancouver will go down while Toronto goes higher? Aside from local shocks such as what we saw when empty homes and foreign buyer taxes were introduced, I cant invision a scenario (aside from natural disasters) where people would pay more for a Toronto house than the same Vancouver house so I would say that Vancouver will trade at a premium to Toronto for the foreseeable future. So then you have to ask will Canadian real-estate take a dive relative to the rest of the world. I think that Canadian realestate is probably growing in attractiveness, not decreasing.

Vancouver real estate is not a bubble. It might go down in the future, possibly even by a lot, but relative to the rest of the world I think it will be stable or potentially even becoming stronger.

This is something I think about a lot, but still don't know the answer to. Vancouver is obviously a very nice place and I understand why the prime areas are expensive - for example, the West Side only has so many houses, so it doesn't take much to significantly impact prices. There's obviously enough demand by international wealthy people to keep price levels high. House prices are obviously not driven at all by local incomes. You can have a $300k salary and still not come close to living in a lot of neighborhoods without already having substantial wealth otherwise (through existing home equity, inheritance, etc.).

What I don't understand is how everything is still so damn expensive even once you get far out of the city. I lived in Toronto previous to moving here... and while Toronto itself has always been expensive, there are tons of way more affordable areas around the GTA (a lot of which can easily access downtown via the Go Train, and public transit in general). In the GVA that doesn't really exist - Coquitlam/Richmond/Port Moody a nice house still costs $1.5M, and even further out in Maple Ridge, Abbotsford, etc. you're still looking at over $1M for anything half decent. There's tons of vacant land out there and also takes forever to get downtown from those places (the WCE is an option, but that only runs like twice a day I think?).

We're at the point in our lives where it's time for us to buy a bigger place... but prices here are so volatile that it scares me to lock in at a certain price when it could easily drop by 20% in a very short amount of time.

My big question is - what changed in the last 10 or so years that caused house prices to rise so dramatically vs. history price changes? Yes, interest rates are lower, but that alone only accounts for a relatively small amount of the price increase. I think the answer is foreign capital flowing into Vancouver (and Canada in general), although not sure to what extent that has driven the prices increases.

How about now?