How’s the market?
Travel abroad, tell someone you’re from Vancouver and the conversation frequently turns to real estate.
So it was at the Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Fair earlier this month, where more than one exhibitor – having established common ground with this columnist through a connection to Vancouver – asked after the health of our real estate market. Prices were up; was a bubble in the making?
Armed with the latest numbers from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s housing outlook conference and the projects from the BC Real Estate Association, yours truly offered a conservative summary of where things stood: prices are high, but no great movement is expected as both buyers and vendors remain patient.
It’s a picture the latest numbers from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver bear out.
While sales activity in October was up 37.8% from the same month a year ago, it was only slightly above the board’s 10-year average. Meanwhile, listings are lagging demand – but without upward pressure on prices.
The benchmark price for all properties in the board’s area for October actually dropped 0.2% from the previous month. This puts prices on a downward trajectory for the latter half of the year, even though prices are 2.1% above the 12-month low of $588,100 plumbed in January 2013.
Weaker growth in prices through the latter half of the year is a well-documented trend, with each of the last five years (except 2009) showing price declines for the period.
Not unique
Of course, the other trope when people find out you’re from Vancouver is praise for its setting.
A fellow guest at the hotel in Hong Kong turned to me in the elevator and, having heard where I was visiting from, exclaimed: “You have such a beautiful city!”
Beautiful, but are we really that much different?
The cover story in Hong Kong’s equivalent to the Georgia Straight that week was a profile of the city’s oldest wet market, soon to be lost to an urban renewal project.
Reader feedback acknowledged that improving the local housing stock was important, yet greater effort was needed to save a venerable part of the city’s cultural fabric.
Meanwhile, the tide of news and social media from Vancouver highlighted the battle to save the Hollywood Theatre in Kitsilano.
That night, a local resident explained over beers how development pressures in Hong Kong are intense – there’s so little available land between the mountains and ocean, you know.
The talk was all so familiar.
But information presented in a seminar Meiburg Wine Media organized prior to the Hong Kong International Wine and Spirits Fair, provided an equally familiar key to the workings of such an intensely developed urban area.
Online wine sales have potential in Hong Kong, Meiburg executive director Sarah Heller said, but most consumers opt to slip around the corner to a streetfront vendor because it’s faster. Shops are never far away, whether by foot or transit – street-smart commuters know the average travel time between Hong Kong transit stations is two minutes (heads-up TransLink, that includes waiting).
Hyperdensity works when there are ways to navigate it and it incorporates the best of the past in the emerging present for the common good.
Courting buyers
Workable density doesn’t mean Vancouver doesn’t have its appeal to property buyers.
This was underscored by an item in Hong Kong’s Standard newspaper – a free English-language daily – previewing Kensington Gardens, which Westbank Projects Corp. plans for 2220 Kingsway.
Sales start this month, and potential buyers were invited to Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel on November 9 and 10 to meet with representatives of local property agents Savills Hong Kong and Knight Frank to consider the opportunity.
The full-page item stood out alongside listings for properties in London, with its promise of “hotel quality living” starting at $269,000.
Magnum Projects Ltd., which is overseeing project marketing for Westbank, was unable to provide comment by deadline on the project’s Hong Kong exposure.
Cameron McNeill, principal of MAC Marketing Solutions, said such initiatives are less common now that markets in Asia have opened.
"It happens in rare cases and nothing I've been involved with recently," he said. "Fifteen years ago we used to take projects to Hong Kong and have success on a one-day or a weekend real estate fair, but there was much more focus with a lot less options for consumers, and now... it's just really hard to stand out, very costly, and we've found that it's not a good use of resources."
