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Baronjutter posted:You could even get some economies of scale going where the city would be a big enough buyer of construction materials that they'd be able to get better deals with suppliers. A very large part of construction costs is all the red tape and design aspects (a 10 million dollar condo building might cost 6 figures in architectural and engineering fees alone). The city could have an extremely streamlined approval process, as well as design process. Could even look at some tasteful pre-fab or modular construction options. Just because the soviets built ugly pre-cast panel housing doesn't mean it all has to be ugly. I totally agree with this; this is more or less the Swedish model, as far as I know. Everyone can afford at minimum a nice, big apartment, but every apartment in Sweden has the same front door. Baronjutter posted:But we won't, because neo-liberalism. In Vancouver, it's also because our city council is bought and paid for by property developers. In 2011 we had the most-financed municipal election campaign in Canadian history, with around $1 mil going to each of the two major parties. And the majority of that funding was from developers. There's some breakdown here, but you can probably dig out the full documents on the CoV website (I can't be arsed to find them again right now). Until that gets fixed, I wouldn't expect to see much positive change on housing from the Vancouver City Council. (Of course this is also a knock-on consequence of the hot money problem, but getting business interests out of government might help.)
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Apr 11, 2013 08:23
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shots shots shots posted:Can you explain more about this? Every Swedish person I have ever met has complained about the cost of anything near Stockholm. My wife is Swedish. A good friend of hers owned a nice two-bedroom apartment on the edges of Stockholm despite being only part-time employed. It was a little far out, but you could be downtown in about 30 minutes using the transit system. I think this is a pretty good example (and looks fairly similar to what my wife's friend owned): http://objekt.fastighetsbyran.se/Objekt/?source=hemnet&ObjektGID=OBJ1460_1258913776 85 square metres = 900 square feet, 2 bedrooms, spacious kitchen, spacious lounge/dining room, hardwood floors, balcony. Price: 1M SEK = CAD$160K. The building itself is ugly as sin, but it's in the middle of park-like grounds and the inside is beautiful. It's located pretty far out, but the J-train station is a short walk away. This is basically low-cost housing in Sweden, and I think the government plays a pretty big role in its construction (my wife pointed out that her friend's apartment had the same front door as her parents' apartment on the other side of the country, and that this was true of about half the apartments in the country.) That said, actual houses closer in to Stockholm do seem to be creeping up into the $1mil range, but it's still possible for pretty much anyone to own a two bedroom with hardwood floors within reasonable travelling distance of their work.
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Apr 11, 2013 21:54
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Baronjutter posted:That would be about 250k or more depending on the laundry situation in Victoria. I'd be fine living in an ugly soviet-looking apartment if it was built well and near transit. How do they keep them so cheap? Oh, it also comes with bicycle storage, 6-8 square metres of dedicated basement storage space, in-building laundry, in-building exercise room, and access to a communal pram storage room. As for how it's so cheap, I really don't know. Someone who understands more about the economics should probably comment on that, but I get the impression that there is a fair degree of government fiscal policy management to regulate housing prices. I also think there may be something in your suggestion of goverment supplied standardized plans and materials, but I don't know for sure.
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Apr 11, 2013 22:49
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Cultural Imperial posted:Cool, I live practically next to you. I'm paying $1500/month (700sq ft 1br) for one of those new places behind the Mt Pleasant community center, how bout you? 800 square feet, utilities included, a block or two from Oak and King Edward: $800/month  It's a basement suite But yeah, finding the place was pretty tough. I think it helped telling our prospective landlady that I was doing a PhD and that my work involved cancer research. She also hasn't put our rent up since we moved in three years ago, but I think that's been helped by the fact that we catsit for her  (and helped her out when she was bedridden following a foot operation last year).Also it is kinda dark, and shittily built/renovated, though the house itself is of solid 50s or earlier vintage.
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May 31, 2013 08:26
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Well if it doesn't, that's OK. We can all live in shipping containers.  http://bc.ctvnews.ca/wee-wonders-container-condos-could-solve-housing-woes-1.1394516 As a comment below the article says, "$850/month to live in a recycled 300 square foot shipping container. Only in Vancouver."
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Aug 2, 2013 21:37
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Our landlady is in the process of selling the house (we're in the basement). The upstairs part is a two bedroom with 800 square feet of space. In theory you could reclaim the basement space as part of the house, but in practice it would require renovations as it is currently set up as a separate suite. Anyway, in some ideal world, it would be the perfect size for a young family just starting out. She's asking $1,48 million, and so far has been getting interest from buyers. Out of curiosity, I plugged that into a mortgage calculator, and it spat out a monthly payment of just under $8,000 (for 30 years, $30K up front). For the mortgage payments to be "only" sucking up 50% of your income, you would need to be making $150K/year. Also, in terms of renting, you couldn't get more than $1K/month for the basement, and you would be lucky if you got $3K for the rest of the house ($2 to $2.5K seems more realistic). So the rent value is about a third to half of the monthly mortgage payment. It does make me realise that the people who have been moving in around the neighbourhood must have family incomes upwards of $200K/year.
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Aug 21, 2013 17:34
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We know that on average these people do not have the income to afford these things from the fact that the average person in BC is in (non-mortgage) debt to the tune of their annual salary (as Cultural Imperial posted at the end of his post). Sure there will be outliers, but I think it's safe to say that the majority of people getting a loan for a $50K car cannot actually afford it. As for it being "their business": it becomes everybody's business when the economy tanks from the housing bubble bursting, they lose their job / get downsized and suddenly have to default on the ton of debt they could just barely service.
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Aug 22, 2013 20:12
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Cultural Imperial posted:Is it really unreasonable to expect people to live within their means? I feel like I've just asked a whole bunch of you to rub semen on your mother's sheets. Persona non grata posted:It is unreasonable to expect someone to work their whole life away making the good life possible for other people, and not be able to enjoy it themselves. I don't honestly believe that this is a dichotomy. Clearly the growing wealth gap is a bad thing, but trying to address that with personal debt is a pretty terrible idea. The correct tools for addressing a wealth gap are things like progressive taxation, worker-protective labour laws, government regulation of the housing market, and a living minimum wage. None of those preclude encouraging fiscal responsibility, and being worried about ballooning personal debt does not automatically translate to bootstraps.
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Aug 22, 2013 22:12
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Shifty Pony posted:There's that word again: average. Very intentional why they are using that term. The thing is, they're using averages for the house prices as well. Fortunately, you can dig up the actual median Toronto price in this document from the Tornot Real Estate Board (pdf). It's $431,000 for August 2013. The last figures on Toronto median household income are from 2010, and put it at $68,110 (it may be higher in 2013, but probably not by much). So the median house price to median income ratio for Toronto is probably about 6.3 (maybe 6 if you adjust for income increases since 2010).
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Sep 7, 2013 23:33
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Majuju posted:My parents were just out to visit in Vancouver this weekend, and we walked around some, where they saw some townhouses up for sale. They took down the realtor information and we checked them out later that evening ($750,000 for a 3br/3ba in a gross pastel 90s development), and were pretty much blown away that such a place could be valued like that. Unfortunately this didn't stop them from parroting the 'build equity, you're throwing your money away' rhetoric. I tried to counter but it's just so entrenched in the collective consciousness that it's impossible to get around it. You build equity faster by renting and putting the remainder away. The first few years of mortgage payments are mostly interest and build you almost zero equity. That all said, a workmate who lives in downtown Vancouver has been thinking of buying a condo with her partner. They're currently paying $1,400 a month in rent, and could buy a place for around $280K. Mortgage payments for that would be around $1700/month. Strata fees and property tax together would likely be around $500. That's $2,200/month, or $800 more than they're paying in rent. Over a 30 year amortization, that $800 they could save comes to $288,000, around the value of the property. I did try to caution them, but it almost looks like it spreadsheets out OK (assuming bubbles don't pop, etc)?
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Oct 11, 2013 00:24
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I have another workmate who has actually bought a condo a few years ago, and is actively involved with his strata board, and the topic of maintenance came up. Basically, they know about all the things that will break, as well as the necessary maintenance to stop other things breaking, but residents refuse to vote in strata fees that will actually pay for them until they break.
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Oct 12, 2013 08:35
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ductonius posted:I would guess it may have something to do with the relative survival rate of English monarchs vs. their respective French cousins. Huh? If I recall my history, the monarchs decapitated by plebs score is 1-1 between England and France. Anyway, I'm not 100% sure that there's anything special about the Anglo/Commonwealth nations. We seem to be somewhere in the middle of the home ownership scale. Interestingly, it's mostly former Communist nations at the top of the scale (Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, China), though there are definitely some exceptions. You even have weird trends that really can't be explained culturally, e.g. France and the Netherlands both have quite low home ownership (55%), while Belgium, which sits between them geographically and culturally, has a very high home ownership (78%). That said, Canada, Australia, the US, the UK, and New Zealand certainly do cluster (at about 65%-69%).
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Oct 14, 2013 21:58
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Baronjutter posted:Can confirm! Friend moving to Seattle as his first "real" career job and starting at nearly 100k. Rents seem about on par with Victoria and cheaper than Vancouver, except you know, actual jobs and an economy exists there. Here, probably. And for BC specifically, try the RTO: http://www.rto.gov.bc.ca/ As far as I can tell BC has some of the best (ie tenant-favouring) rental laws in the world. Once you've signed the lease, you're pretty well protected. Just make sure to do a good condition inspection -- the RTO actually provide a form to help with that.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:49
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Arabidopsis posted:The damage deposit is my biggest pet peeve with renting. I'm in BC. You ... don't sound particularly peeved about this. As a renter in BC, I'm certainly not. rrrrrrrrrrrt posted:Baronjutter if you signed the contract, you might be SoL although I really have no idea. I would be very hesitant to sign bullshit "riders" on leases and I've at least heard anecdotes that landlords/property managers will withdraw them if you pushback a little. I think renters underestimate how much clout they have in general, especially if they have a steady income and halfways decent references. Not really -- the contract comes up for renegotiation at its end (usually one year, but it depends what he signed). At that point, he can do the "strike this conditions or I walk" thing, if he's feeling ballsy enough. It's a risk, though, both in terms of references and not having the hassle of finding and moving into another place. Anyway, cleaning almost certainly won't run more than a hundred bucks or so, so it probably isn't worth the drama.
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Dec 24, 2013 23:00
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Franks Happy Place posted:Contracts you sign don't overrule whatever is outlined in legislation. A lease agreement that stipulates something that isn't in some way backed up by the RTA is unenforceable. I'm not sure if agreeing to extra cleaning is outlined somewhere because its been a while since I read through it, but if there isn't a specific RTA clause about that then its meaningless. There's a section at the end of the government-approved template specifically for additional clauses (like pet deposits, no smoking, etc). As long as no rights are waived, the clauses are not "unconscionable" and both parties agree, they're legit.
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Dec 25, 2013 01:18
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ocrumsprug posted:This is how Vancouver does filtering. I used to bike home past that while they were demolishing it, often late at night. At first, there were a few houses spraypainted with crying eyes and graffiti to the effects of "don't take away our homes!" About a day or two later, the chainlink fence and 24-hour security guards with dogs appeared. It was quite the bit of political/business interest nastiness that got very little attention in the local press. The first condo block has just started going up on the east side of the lot. 
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Jan 2, 2014 22:57
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ocrumsprug posted:I am surprised they started construction. I was guessing that the developer was going to hold out until the number of social housing units he needed to build in the new development was zero. Hmmm... I've dug up the development application, and curiously, the stuff they are building right now is all social housing. Page 7 and 8 have the overall site plans, and they are pretty extensive -- the social bit is just a tiny corner. It could be pretty nice, though -- lots of mixed use, plus what looks like a small community centre. It was still pretty lovely kicking all those people out.
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Jan 3, 2014 00:13
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Cultural Imperial posted:Where did they end up? "Other social housing", apparently. You can bet it was nowhere near as well located, though, and tearing 700 people out of a community in one fell swoop does not do good things for the community. Apparently it was the Province behind all this, though -- Geoff Meggs has little good to say about the process. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/after-protests-and-planning-little-mountain-ready-to-rise/article4372893/ GlobeAndMail posted:The saga started in 2007, when the federal government handed over all of its social-housing sites to the provinces.
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Jan 3, 2014 02:33
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The place we had to move out of sold for $1.3 mill. The house was worth about $50k of that. I couldn't find the place we're living now, but the surrounding properties are valued between $1.5m and $2m each, again with house values well under $100k. This is along a major street slated for condos, though, so I guess that factors into the value? I would have thought the constant and massive traffic would lower property values, but I guess it's all down to the value as a development opportunity. ocrumsprug posted:Where are you seeing the change from last years assessment? When you select the property and click the "more info" button.
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Jan 3, 2014 21:30
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Those numbers for house value make me think a little bit about property as an "investment": the building part of the property actually depreciates in value (like a car). Cars are a great investment.
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Jan 4, 2014 08:13
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To be fair that is right on the edge of Shaugnessy, surrounded by 4,000+ square foot minimansions. It's also on the market for $1.2m more than its evaluation. The next door neighbours at 2003 W 20th are probably a more realistic comparison:evaluebc posted:Property Address Total Assessed Total Land Total Building http://goo.gl/maps/Ur8bU That house looks pretty big and new-ish, and I could believe that it's worth a million (or would cost a million to build), but it's still a far cry from the Beverly Hills mansion with a view.
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Jan 7, 2014 00:20
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Cultural Imperial posted:Here's what you get in the Medina neighbourhood of Seattle for 3.5 mil. Bill Gates lives down the street. http://www.shaughnessyhouses.com/homes-sale/houses-3m-5m/l/details-34303938  The Seattle house is a little nicer, but not by that much, and I have a feeling a lot of that is the photographer/photoshopper being more skilled. The absurdity is that the teardown a few posts back is worth as much as that house, and I'd be curious to see if it sells. I can see someone with tons of money buying a Vancouver property for $1.5m and building a $1 - 1.5m house on it (in fact I did see this a lot in my old neighbourhood), but I find it difficult to believe that anyone would pay $3.5m for a vacant plot, let alone almost $5m.
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Jan 7, 2014 01:33
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Whatever you do, don't go with The Rental Guide (rentalguide.ca). They are a huge scam with tons of complaints against them. Unfortunately, they also spam up Craigslist and other classifieds with fake ads they use to harvest your contact details, so be wary. I think as mentioned in previous posts in this thread, you're pretty well protected by BC rental laws. Just make sure you ask the right questions and look for the right things when viewing the place, and don't feel obliged to take the first place you get a viewing. Some red flags would be lack of extractor fans in the bathroom or kitchen, especially in a basement suite. Also any obvious signs of damp. You should look at whether heating is included, and if not the type of heating and how well insulated the place is, and factor that into the rental cost. You can ask for estimates on heating bills. Oh, this site is pretty good. It's run by the government as a general (and legal) resource: http://www.tenants.bc.ca/main/ This is another: http://www.rto.gov.bc.ca/content/rightsresponsibilities/default.aspx You should definitely at least skim through the legal stuff. There's also the gooncave thread in A/T about house hunting more generally. I think now is a good time to be looking in terms of getting cheaper rents, since demand is lower. It's a lovely time to be moving in Vancouver weather, though.
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Jan 10, 2014 07:58
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At least it has a happy ending.quote:A big thank you to everyone for your help. Although, wouldn't REITs stand to lose a ton of money if/when the bubble bursts? At least she's diversified, though, and not tied down to one single property.
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Jan 12, 2014 21:50
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Anyway, I've been mulling something else over to bring up with this thread. Does anyone feel like prognosticating on the Oakridge Mall development plans? They look pretty nice to me -- basically another Metrotown, but done according to much more modern design principles (most notably multi-mode accessible rather than car-centric). There are plans for promenades, sidewalk cafes, a massive rooftop park, and tons of residential.  http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/visualizing-the-oakridge-proposal.pdf http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2013/10/oakridge-mall-redevelopment-renders-and-details/ Of course, there's a campaign against the proposal, calling itself "NOakridge", which despite having a huge banner hung on the side of the existing mall has only garnered 47 likes on its Facebook page. It also seems like pretty blatant astroturf by the opposition party in the Vancouver mayoral elections, which is pretty dumb given that this initiative was started while they were actually in power. Anyway, the only concern I have is if the housing bubble bursts midway through construction, and everything is left half-built. On the other hand, given that it's being financed by a $150 billion public pension plan from Quebec, maybe it's pretty secure?
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Jan 12, 2014 22:13
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Baronjutter posted:It always seems so weird to me to build huge skyscrapers next to single family houses. Wouldn't it be way cheaper to just upgrade all the single family homes to 4-6 story dense wood frame? The cost per square foot goes up so quick once you get into concrete, let alone skyscrapers. They've rezoned all the lots immediately on the major road grid for up to 6 story development, so this has in fact happened. You can even see it in the picture I linked -- they foresee 4-6 story mixed use buildings all the way along Cambie and 41st. Obviously not all of this will happen all at once (in part because they first have to buy people out of their houses), but several are already going up. Franks Happy Place posted:This has long been a problem with Vancouver city planners- they just don't give a poo poo, because nobody making 5 storey mixed-use buildings is raining cash on mayoral candidates. See: Broadway/Commercial redevelopment clusterfuck. So, given what I've said above, I'm not sure why you would say something like this. While I haven't taken the time to disentangle that web of developer contributions in the last Vancouver municipal election, I would be really surprised if developers of 5-story mixed use weren't represented, given how much 5-story mixed use is going up. Franks Happy Place posted:Phone posting so I can't dig up all the relevant links, but here's the basic gist. I'm confused as to what the clusterfuck was? The city proposed a big tower in one round of the consultation. The community opposed it strongly. It got removed from the plan. That ... sounds like the consultation process is working?
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Jan 13, 2014 00:58
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Franks Happy Place posted:The city had all kinds of consultations with locals who showed them they definitely preferred (or were willing to accept) a big increase in density, but along the lines of 5-10 storey mixed use buildings all along Commercial/Main. The city planners listened, nodded their heads, said "We'll be right back with the final proposal!", and came back with a 37-storey megatower. If you somehow missed that critical part of the article, 37 storeys is, uuh, kind of big and would be just a little out of character for Commercial Drive. At any rate, the key part here is that nobody in the general public was ever shown plans for a tower, a tower was never brought up in consultations, and a tower is a terrible stupid loving idea that is so clearly the result of the development industry buying Vancouver city council that I don't even know what to say. I personally disagree on towers and density. Density in general is Hell, in the planning document I found, they were talking about a whole city block of 27-36 story towers, with other blocks in the 22 story range, and a staggering out through a whole splay of heights down to 4-6 story. All in all it could allow a hell of a lot of people to live, work and shop within 10 minutes walk of a Skytrain stop, which is a good thing. I really don't personally get the opposition to towers, especially from otherwise progressive and environmentally-minded people. That all said, I don't dispute this: Franks Happy Place posted:Edit: I can't say how I heard it, sadly, but I was told adding the tower(s) to the Grandview plan was a political decision made by a political appointee who shall remain nameless, but is answerable to Vision and not a normal municipal employee. and it kinda concerns me. However, I feel like Vision and the non-partisan City staff are doing a pretty good job of tempering the influence of developers, especially through the consultation process. Sure, a tower appeared in the plan that was really unpopular with the residents. But there were multiple iterations of the plan, and additional consultations after the iteration with the tower in. Hell, City Council even went so far as to extend the entire planning process by 12 months, so they will end up with a nearly two year long planning process, which feels maybe a little long (if anything, that's the clusterfuck). Anyway, as I said above, I kinda agree with towers going up, but I respect that residents in Grandview may not, and I feel like their views have been respected by City Council.
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Jan 13, 2014 09:47
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Cultural Imperial posted:This cbc video is hilarious. Ahahaha! Yes, your $1200/month in basement suite rental income (more like $900 after maintenance, vacancy, tax, etc) is totally gonna help you out with the $5-8K/month you'll be paying on your $1.2m mortgage. How do they manage to present this stuff with a straight face?
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Jan 15, 2014 22:02
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Baronjutter posted:From what I can tell Vancouver has quite a brain-drain. So many of my friends got fancy and in-demand degrees here in Victoria then moved to Vancouver to get a job and realized there just aren't actual jobs in vancouver outside of construction, service, and real-estate. So they all had to gently caress off to Calgary or the US for actual tech/science jobs. You hear that story over and over, it's just a poo poo place for most careers. Vancouver has a very simple and fragile economy, the whole town is just sort of held together with the absolute bare minimum of productive jobs needed to keep the realestate/construction industry going and I have no clue what the hell they are going to do if/when things crash. There was also a post about 10-20 pages back from a guy who works in tech about how hard it was for him to hire good talent because the salaries in tech in Vancouver are so lovely, which, coupled with the high cost of living, also promotes brain drain. There are jobs available in research (especially medical), since that's basically all government (and charity) funded, but you don't do that kind of work for the salary, and there are only so many jobs.
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Jan 16, 2014 21:14
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Is it likely that all this press attention will trigger the start of the panic sell-off? Or will that wait until interest rates increase?
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Jan 19, 2014 20:28
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Cultural Imperial posted:I doubt it. Based on sales data, it seems like most buyers haven't gotten the message yet. What I mean is, there have been a bunch of high-profile business papers publishing the story over the past few days, alongside talks of large hedge funds shorting Canadian real estate. What I'm wondering is whether this will be the first stirrings of a change in the narrative leading to the inevitable downward spiral of panic selling. Could this be the year? Throatwarbler posted:http://globalnews.ca/news/1091657/gallery-west-vancouver-waterfront-home-destroyed-by-fire/ As long as Gaius Baltar's house is still OK, who cares? You seriously have to wonder what the insurance premiums are on a house that literally has no access to fire hydrants.
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Jan 20, 2014 01:33
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You know, I just saw an ad for this anti-investing fraud campaign on the bus: [quote=InvestRight -- A program of the BC Securities Commission] Protect yourself If an investment you're interested has the characteristics of one of the five warning signs below—it’s okay to say ‘no’. #1 - No risk! There’s no such thing as a guaranteed investment: the higher the returns, the higher the risk. This type of sales pitch is often aimed at people who live on a fixed income or those near or in early retirement who are worried about having enough money. #2 - Profit like the pros! These scams are pitched as opportunities known only to a select few who are said to be making a lot of money. The scam artist convinces you that he or she has access to this inside information. An example of this is the‘prime bank’ scam. Investors are told about the existence of a secret market that only the world’s largest banks know about and are then given an exclusive opportunity to participate in this secret market. The catch is, secret prime bank markets don’t exist. #3 - Offshore, tax free! Fraudsters pitch this deal as a way to avoid paying taxes. They may try to convince you to move your money outside Canada to avoid taxes. They really want you to move it to an inaccessible offshore account. They also tell you to keep it a secret so that you don't benefit from the advice of financial advisors who might see through the scam. Read more on offshore investment schemes. #4 - Get in now! Scam artists use this tactic to pressure you into making a quick decision. They suggest they have secret information about a company that the general public doesn’t have. This kind of sales pitch appeals to your fear of missing out on a valuable opportunity. Take your time to research an investment advisor, salesperson, company, and investment before you invest. #5 - Your friends and family can’t be wrong! Scam artists target religious, ethnic, or close-knit groups by working their way into organizations and befriending members. This approach relies on the trust you place in the people you care about. Do a background check on the person who brings the investment opportunity to your attention - no matter how trustworthy. Report it and warn others If you have been approached or know of an investment that fits the description above, contact your provincial securities regulator immediately. In BC, contact BCSC Inquiries. You can also anonymously report suspicious activity through InvestRight’s Report a scam webpage. Residents from other Canadian provinces can find contact information for their provincial securities regulator at https://www.securities-administrators.ca. If you know a person who has put money into, or is considering contributing, to an investment like the one described above, give or send them this information, and encourage them to do more research. [/quote] And I wondered, just how many of the examples of terrible real estate investment "opportunities" materials we've seen posted in this thread would qualify. I mean, 1,2,4 and 5 seem to come up pretty regularly.
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Jan 21, 2014 21:58
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Cultural Imperial posted:-said no one in detroit Houses, yes. But not the land underneath them. Nobody in Vancouver is buying a million dollar property with a three bedroom for the house. The houses on top, though, well you only have to leaf through those Vancouver property assessments to see that the car analogy is exactly true, and that 100 years is probably too long for the average North American house built since the 50s. 40-year old houses are valued at less than $50K, while the new houses going up on million-dollar lots are typically valued at a million or more themselves (but almost certainly won't still be valued that much in 2040 dollars once 2040 rolls around).
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Feb 3, 2014 03:05
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tagesschau posted:The land is basically like gold, though, in that it's not going to appreciate faster than inflation in the long term, no matter how much the This is exactly the image I had in mind. It's like a car with a solid gold bar embedded in the chassis. Cultural Imperial posted:You know, my problem with this argument is, what cold hearted hayekian shithead is actually going out and buying empty plots of land right now, in such great volumes that it's driving up prices in the market? Even the dumbest capitalist knows that land in and of itself generates no revenue unless you have a dwelling or a shop or a farm sitting on top of it. The kind who speculates on gold? Of course condos, unlike houses, have no land you can sell at the end of their life, so are a lot more like cars.
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Feb 3, 2014 19:32
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OhYeah posted:If living in one house for 15+ years is wasting money than how come the most expensive real estate here is in the Old Town, where some buildings are 500+ years old? I'm pretty sure you have that the wrong way around. They're saying at least 15 years to break even on mortgage and transaction costs. Of course, that's making some kind of assumption about the growth in value.
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Feb 4, 2014 17:51
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Lexicon posted:Holy christ - maybe the realtors are right about the permanence of Vancouver's ultra expense. Maybe not so much. Cross-posted from the CanPol Megathread: Franks Happy Place posted:So here's some budget nuggets that pretty much everyone in this thread can actually be happy about (rare, I know!):
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Feb 11, 2014 23:46
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Cultural Imperial posted:http://m.theglobeandmail.com/life/h...?service=mobile I dunno -- I think we'll be seeing a lot more communal living in the years to come, given that the prediction is for things to only get worse generation over generation. There are also better ways to do it: the place I'm living in is a duplex house that's been carved up into five apartments -- three basement suites and two upstairs. I'm pretty sure it now legally qualifies as an apartment complex. The owners, a family of three, live in one of the upstairs suites. The other suites have an 80-year old Canadian lady, a Mexican lady in her 40s with her son, my wife and I, and a Chilean family of three in the other upstairs suite. The owners have owned the place for 15+ years, so they bought before the bubble. I wouldn't buy a place to do this now, but for somebody who owns a place already this could make a lot of sense. Also, from that article, a REALTOR(TM) who almost gets it: Ben Smith, VP of sales and marketing at Rennie & Associates posted:“It’s exciting, because for years we’ve been talking about this, and we’re finally seeing it happen,” he says. “There is $88-billion worth of clear-title real estate tied up with boomers. In B.C. and Vancouver especially, we are all equity and no income.” ... and as those boomers crash the market by dumping all that equity, we'll get back to being no equity, no income.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:58
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EngineerJoe posted:So... the bank has no incentive to get fair value for the defaulted property? Great... When poo poo gets bad we'll have the banks racing to the bottom to unload foreclosed homes. Isn't there also the issue of selling the property in the first place? I mean, wasn't part of the problem in the US housing crisis that there simply wasn't enough liquidity in the market for the banks to unload the properties at any price, let alone a fair one?
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Mar 1, 2014 07:43
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Cultural Imperial posted:Bob rennie the yellow king of real estate is charging motherfuckers 25k to have lunch with mayor moonbeam Except he isn't, and the Province is continuing to show off its Conrad Blackian yellow journalism. Hell, you can even tell as you read the article that they lied to the "development professional" they interviewed in the same way as they were being duplicitous with that headline. It's also a complete canard -- $25,000 per? That's chump change. Both Vision and the NPA's election campaigns last time around got funded way more than that by plenty of developers, Bob Rennie included (on both sides). If the Province could actually do some investigative journalism into the bigger problem, rather than launching an obviously partisan sensationalistic attack piece, I'd be willing to give it more credence. And "mayor moonbeam"? Besides the obvious crazies who comment on Vancouver newspaper articles, who says that? E: It is at least good to see this entering the public consciousness, it's just that I'm 99% sure the NPA are doing the same thing, and it would be good to see that reported on, rather than the blatant political cocksucking this article represents. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Mar 7, 2014 |
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Mar 7, 2014 18:30
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 23:02 |
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beepo posted:$400 jeans are a bit of an exaggeration, but I see lots of places selling $150-$250 jeans. It's not just places like Holt Renfrew, pretty much anything above mall brands are going to be in that price range. The thing is, you can buy say a $150 pair of Naked and Famous jeans that are made in Canada from high-quality Japanese denim and will last four times longer than $50 budget jeans. That's actually cheaper in the long term, and better for the local economy. $400 jeans, though? Eh. PT6A posted:Is it, though? Of the people I know who are working full-time, salaried jobs, I'd say only one of them has consumer debt problems (caused by stupidity and possibly a gambling problem). Consumer debt is a major problem, I agree, but luxury purchases needn't necessarily be made on credit. You also live in the middle of Oil Boom Town. Most of the people you know are likely in the top quintile nationally in terms of earnings (for now). Franks Happy Place posted:Since nobody in this thread has said one single god-damned thing about whether or not people are morally entitled to expensive consumer goods, perhaps you have come here with an axe to grind? As I'm pretty sure most of us know from the other thread and the frequency of badvatars, PT6A has a whole shed full of blunt axes.
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Mar 24, 2014 19:42
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