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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
There are 250,000 apartments and townhouses, again you are out in Maple Ridge or Pitt Meadows but that's not some Detroit hell hole! There are worse places to live.
Again I ain't saying it's cheap, I've told my daughter that if she's happy in Halifax she'd be nuts to move back to Vancouver but if you have to or want to live in the area it's do'able.
I also disagree that it's due to foriegn buyers, that's a small part of it but it's low interest rates and stupid buyers that are causing most of it, locals, once they're in the market don't seem to care what they pay as the money is essentially free to borrow and the idiots here think that it's just going to keep rising forever, I'm in east Van, we don't have any foriegn buyers, just a bunch of hipsters that are all using equity to buy new beamers and ducattis.
Trying to get a quote on a bathroom reno is proving a nightmare for me, builders are quoting 40 or 50,000 for a standard small bathroom job, when you push back on the price their answer is 'why do you care the money's free and your house is worth a million?' it's a market that is primed for a huge crash.
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Much of this is very true. It is not solely on foreign buyers but what has been happening lately, past year or so is. Many mid to high end homes are purchased and sold multiple times in a year and are never lived in. A house that sold for $2.5mil is back on the market in 3 months at $2.8mil. At least locals are looking for homes to live in and not just a quick investment to flip. There's a block not far from where I live in Burnaby that has 6 homes that are less then 2 years old that have never been lived in. Between the 6 they have been sold 8 times since the initial purchase. Stuff like that is nuts.
Yes, you can live farther out but if you work downtown the commutes can be killer but lots of people do do this. I had chances to move out to maple Ridge but we decided that being able to get our kids to their activities and not relying on babysitters and daycares to work past 6pm was more important. We love the location we are in, have plenty of space and the kids love it there with lots of other kids to play with. I wouldn't say we sacrificed anything as we love it there but we don't own and that has it's drawbacks.
There are starter family homes that you could argue are $1mil over priced. Even a 50% reduction brings a small 3 bedroom home down to the $700K range. Those are still incredibly high numbers.