Over the last couple of months since there have been a opening up of the markets, we, along with many other realtors I am sure, have been servicing a good number of clients wanting to buy into the lower end of the detached market in Metro Vancouver. It should come as no surprise to anyone that this segment has come out of the break rather hot. I don’t think multiple offers was supposed to coincide with 8 million people being placed on the CERB emergency program. But, it has happened. I won’t go into the details of news articles on how listings haven’t kept up with the demand, or that there were a lot of pent up demand; we try to be unique after all. I will do what we do best, which is to take a long term view.
I share this article from better dwelling here.
This was published in 2017 using the stats from the 2016 census compared to the 2011 census. As they have shown, it should come to no one’s surprise that detached total inventory in Vancouver proper is going down year after year. It appears that we are much better at knocking down detached properties to create something else than to build them. This should come as no surprise given all the land assemblies. We did convert a number of detached lots into duplex lots in Vancouver. So I would expect to see the supply of detached properties go into decline long term. This is no prediction on future prices but if I were to invest on anything, a commodity with an ever decreasing supply sounds pretty good,
Oh, and for some more raw numbers. The link below shows the exact numbers of the different types of properties, In 2016, there were only 41,330 properties classified as single detached. Some have correctly noted that those with legal suites are now classified in the second category, semi detached properties, even accounting for them, we are likely only in the 70K range for total supply. What happens when this city eventually hits 1 million people?
https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/housing-characteristics-fact-sheet.pdf