NEWS

The Grand Canyon

     A while ago, I got to go and see one of the seven natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon.

     We drove to the South Rim from where we were staying, and arrived in the late afternoon. It was hot and sunny, and we didn’t really know what to expect from the wonder. As we rolled in, there were lots of trees and shrubbery around, making it difficult to see the canyon yet. We drove through several different parking lots until we found a place to park. It was surprisingly busy!

     From the parking lot, we walked down until we found a path going along the South Rim, and followed it, enjoying the breathtaking views along the way. There were lots of areas along the ridge that allowed you to sit on the ledge and look over the canyon, without the risk of falling down into the canyon.

     At one point, we found a trail heading down into the canyon, and we went part of the way down. Part way, we stopped at a funny little outcrop to enjoy the view. In a future visit to here, I would enjoy hiking all the way down to see the wonder from a different perspective. After this, we hiked back up and continued on our way.

     As we walked around, we came to a tower with a fantastic view of the canyon. In the bottom of the tower was a shop with souvenirs, and we went up a winding staircase to the top of the tower. At the top, a thick wooden door led to a large balcony with a fantastic view of the canyon. By the time we got here, we were able to catch the sun setting over the natural wonder. The sunset filled the sky and the Grand Canyon with breathtaking shades of yellow, red, and orange. It was an incredibly memorable end to a beautiful day at the Grand Canyon.

In an effort to fix Vancouver's housing market, eager politicians are quick to impose new rental policies that wind up making the affordability problem much worse.

City of Vancouver adds protections and education initiates for renters; . The primary purpose of these initiatives is to ensure that renters are educated on the policies that affect them, and that they’re armed with all available tools to advocate for their needs

The real estate downturn - the fact that housing prices aren’t exploding as they have been the last few years - continues to make developers with condo projects in some stage of completion very nervous about making as much as they projected, and promised to their investors, and bankers and rivals and wives.

 It is a real downturn, to be clear. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver claims that we’re currently in the biggest housing slump of the last 19 years. There are currently 25,158 condo units under construction in Metro Vancouver. At least 5,000 of those units have been taken off the market temporarily, in hopes the market will get back to golden soon. It’s hard to get rid of the visions of the block-circling lines of buyers from what seems like yesterday.

 A big reason for the halt in pre-sale condo purchases is the introduction of the foreign-buyers’ tax in August 2016. Condos went from being on the market for mere hours to lingering there for what’s now an average of 40 days or more. While this was presumably the point, the less desirable consequence is the parallel pause in the much-needed rental units that are part of a good number of these projects.

 For those developers who’ve chosen to stay in the race, the incentives for prospective buyers are fast becoming a source of entertainment for the spectators. So far, they’ve included the incredibly pandering ‘avocado toast’ incentive for buying a unit in a West Coquitlam project built by Woodbridge Homes. The ploy definitely worked, as a media primed to write about anything millennial went wild with the story, resulting in Woodbridge moving 60% of their inventory after the announcement. (They also reduced the down payment from 15% to 10% of the cost of the unit, but that’s boring.)

 Not to be outdone, Wesgroup decided to add a free glass of wine every day for a year to their list of buyer perks for their new development in the River District. This adds to their discounts of $10,000 for 1 bedrooms, $15,000 for 2 bedrooms and $20,000 for three bedrooms in the new project.

 The same company threw a bone to its rental customers, offering to pay for moving expenses for new residents of their New Westminster purpose-built rental project.

Other companies have enticed buyers with six months of free living; a $5,000 gift card to Urban Barn; and free skiing and golf for a year plus mountain bikes for the family (or just the cash equivalent). There’s also just a much more enticing environment for negotiations on things like decoration services, amenity upgrades, parking stalls and the like.

So it’s a good time to buy if you have the means. And it’s a good time to get creative with demands. Gym memberships? Vacation packages? Season tickets to the Canucks? It’s all on the table. As the old folks say, you never know how far a frog’ll jump until you poke it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Money laundering continues to widen the gap between average wages and average home prices in Metro Vancouver in more extreme ways than in any other city in the world apart from Hong Kong.

Vancouver is by far the most unaffordable housing market in North America, and the second most unaffordable in the world.

The city of New Westminster became the first municipality in B.C. to apply the provincial government’s new rental residential tenure zoning authority to existing rental housing stock in opposite manner for which it was intended.

Vancouver's strict Airbnb regulations miss the mark on increasing overall rental vacancy.

New zoning law gives cities the power to mandate a percentage of units to be rentals or to protect existing rental properties from redevelopment.