Booming condominium and townhouse sales helped keep Greater Vancouver’s real estate market humming in June, offsetting a decline in detached house sales.

The number of condo transactions rose to 1,496 last month, a 10.4-per-cent increase over June 2003, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported Monday. Likewise, sales of attached properties rose 8.8 per cent to 556.

Overall, 3,501 homes changed hands, one per cent off last year’s pace, as detached house sales declined 12.7 per cent to 1,449. On a year-to-date basis, the number of home sales in 2004 is still running 17 per cent ahead of 2003.

“Condos continue to be the big story, with nearly 45 per cent of sales in the Greater Vancouver market being apartments,” said board president Andrew Peck.

Peck said buyers have grown more confident in buying apartments since the leaky condo debacle of the late 1990s, thanks to better construction and warranties. And, like other sectors of the market, condo sales are being driven by low interest rates and confidence in B.C.’s economy.

Renters who have been thinking about buying may be taking the plunge now rather than risk being shut out of the market by higher interest rates in the future, he said.

Peck said a continued shortage of listings is constraining the activity in detached houses, though the rapid increase in prices over the past year is encouraging some homeowners, especially at the lower end, to put their homes on the market.

Prices continue to rise at a double-digit pace virtually across the board.

For the first time, the Real Estate Board’s benchmark price of a typical house in the region passed the half-million-dollar mark. The benchmark price of a detached home rose 18.7 per cent over the previous year to $501,380.

The value of the benchmark townhouse rose at about the same rate to $321,600, while the condo benchmark jumped 21.7 per cent to $241,180.

The average price of a house in Greater Vancouver — which can be skewed by the sale of very valuable properties such as a waterfront home in West Vancouver that sold last month for a record $17 million — reached a new high of $542,698.

Townhouse prices averaged $313,013, also a new high, while the average condo price edged down slightly from May, to $246,918.

Some of the hottest areas included the Sunshine Coast, where the number of house sales rose 57.7 per cent; East Vancouver, where townhome sales soared 74.1 per cent, and Burnaby, where apartment sales increased 50 per cent.

The total value of Greater Vancouver residential sales (including multi-family rental buildings and undeveloped land) was $1.37 billion in June and $7.94 billion for the first six months of the year. Thanks to the combination of brisker sales and higher prices, the latter represented a 34-per-cent jump over first-half 2003 numbers. Last year’s sales went on to set a record for the region.

The story was similar south of the Fraser River, where the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board recorded 1,825 home sales last month, up a modest three per cent from June 2003. As in Vancouver, however, the number of transactions for the first half of the year beat the year-earlier figure by 17 per cent.

The average single-family home for the region stretching from Delta in the west to Abbotsford in the east was $346,093, up 17.1 per cent from a year earlier. Townhouses averaged $226,115 and condos, $138,177.

“Even though more homeowners have decided to take advantage of the market and make a move from their current residence, and we’ve seen an increase to our new listings, buyers are eating through that new inventory quickly,” said Fraser Valley board president Moss Maloney. “With interest rates expected to increase this fall, it will be interesting to see whether things slow much over the summer.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2004