The Lower Mainland has it all — except, perhaps, affordable habitation for those trying to break into a booming market that shows no sign of slowing
Shelley Fralic
Sun
How hot is hot property in the Lower Mainland? So hot that when you log on to the mls.ca website, as any self-respecting lookie-loo does with some regularity, you’ll discover there are 150 Greater Vancouver condominiums — we repeat, condominiums — priced at more than $1 million.
So hot that when you search the site for single-family homes in Greater Vancouver priced between $1 million and “unlimited” — unlimited clearly being the height of prescience in this market — there are so many hits that the site suggests you narrow the search.
So, you plug in the word “detached,” and still there are close to 500 houses listed at more than $1 million, the most expensive being a modern West Vancouver waterfront estate priced at $20.8 million.
Sign on the dotted line and you’ll get 11,000 square feet for that kind of money, with a bunch of bedrooms and bathrooms, maid’s quarters, a pool and waterfall, and a boat house.
(If you follow such things, and who doesn’t, you also know it’s not even the most expensive house currently listed in B.C. — that distinction goes to a $25-million waterfront estate in Victoria.)
While you’re recovering from that breathtaking discovery, you decide to search for the least expensive house in the Lower Mainland, recalling the (what now seems like a) pittance you paid for your own house in the ‘burbs 18 years ago, or the even more mind-boggling $17,000 your folks paid for that elegant Tudor on the big lot in South Vancouver in the mid-’60s.
Welcome to 20457 Lorne Ave. in Maple Ridge, at this moment in multiple listing service time, the cheapest house on the market in Greater Vancouver. Price tag: $237,900.
It’s a two-bedroom, one-bath old-timer on a 60-by-100 foot lot with 1,016 square feet of livable space. Or as realtor Daryl DeMarco’s listing says: “Westside rancher. Needs work but appears to be a solid house. Hardwood under existing flooring. Loc. corner of Lorne and Hammond.”
That puts the house, which hasn’t been updated in 30 years, smack dab on the corner of a busy railroad crossing — not exactly the location, location, location one would hope for, but these days not expected to be the purchasing roadblock it might have once been.
Even DeMarco can’t believe the market these days.
“When I started out just over 15 years ago, the cheapest house in this area was $80,000 to $85,000. I was shocked when they went up to $120,000. I thought, ‘who’s going to pay $120,000?’ “
In fact, if you search the Lower Mainland housing market today, you need to start at about $250,000 — unless you’re in the market for a float home, a double-wide in a trailer park or a waterfront cabin accessible only by water.
Even elsewhere in B.C., there are shockingly few hits under $200,000, but for, say, a little $59,000 cutie in Wells, and houses in places like Bowser, Dawson Creek, Campbell River, Sayward and Nanaimo, where entry-level can start in the mid-$100,000 range.
Back in this neck of the woods, it’s clear that shopping for a house with a little piece of land is more like hitting Harrod’s with a pocketful of green stamps.
So you leave the single-family category search and switch to the condo market, which is surely more sane, you think, until you punch in a search for Greater Vancouver condominiums under $100,000.
Up pop several strata rooms in Richmond hotels (cheap like borscht, yes, but they’re essentially one room and don’t have kitchens), and a number of condos with outstanding repair assessments, a common trait in leaky condo land where many of the units on the market are saddled with assessments as hefty as $80,000, payable by the purchaser.
The best unencumbered deal under $100,000 takes you back out to Maple Ridge, to a one-bedroom, 640-square-foot unit with amenities that include “central location, recreation nearby, shopping nearby, storage, air-conditioned, drapes/window coverings, passenger elevator, shared laundry.”
For $95,000.
It’s a 34-year-old condo, in a three-storey building, with a monthly maintenance fee of $191.
While you’re mulling your tragic decision not to buy that Whistler condo for $29,000 back in the ’80s, you punch in the big condo numbers.
And there it is, the most expensive apartment in Greater Vancouver, one of about 150 priced at more than $1 million currently on the mls.ca site.
Way over $1 million, actually.
The hottest condo property is a two-storey penthouse on Lost Lagoon, its 5,000 recently renovated square feet covering the 19th and 20th floors of the Presidio building on Barclay, taking in unobstructed 360-degree views from an assortment of balconies totalling 1,350 square feet.
For $9.8 million, you get private elevator access, several bathrooms, a library, a media room, dining and living room. The custom kitchen is massive and has a 600-bottle wine cooler.
A stainless-steel open staircase connects the two floors and there’s an outdoor kitchen off the second-floor guest suite.
One of the terraces overlooking the lagoon has a funky free-standing circular office just steps from an infinity-edge hot tub.
The walls throughout the place are cladded in limed oak and the radiant-heat floors are honed limestone.
It’s a beauty, to be sure, even though it only has two bedrooms and a condo fee, should you be interested, of $1,500 a month, or roughly a year’s worth of mortgage payments on the three-bedroom bungalows that were selling like hotcakes in the south Vancouver post-war subdivisions back in 1950.
And you think, who would have thought it?
Because this has been less an exercise in voyeurism than it has been an education in this harsh reality: The pursuit of the white picket fence, for many Lower Mainlanders, has become nothing more than an unwinnable Internet board game.
May we suggest it be called Sticker Shock.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006