once more unto, etc

[jazzfish]

I've said for a long time that I don't really want to own my own home. I have zero interest in living in a detached house at all: yards are the devil, and a house is just one neverending weekend project. And renting means being able to call someone else when the sink breaks, or the water heater goes out. Conversely, buying a condo means having to convince a majority of everyone else in the building to pay for things like structural repairs & maintenance, versus kicking it down the road. (I believe much of the United States is currently watching this play out in slow motion.)

A couple of years ago, when we were looking to move out of Coal Harbour, we kicked around the idea of buying a condo in a new development that was going up in Chinatown. As part of that we also kicked around the idea of buying a condo somewhere else. Ultimately that went nowhere, in large part because we're cheapskates and Vancouver real estate is a decades-old bubble that shows no sign of popping anytime in the near future. Instead we moved out to New Westminster, closer to the Skytrain stop (and to groceries) but half an hour outside of downtown.

Two-plus years later, Vancouver real estate is if anything a *worse* decades-old bubble etc, the rental market is beyond terrible, and we're sick of living half an hour from nearly everything we want to do. (Notable exceptions to this last: really good poutine, the best barbecue in the Lower Mainland, and a couple of friends who live closer to New West than to Vancouver proper.) We've been looking for a place to rent for almost a year now with no success. Vancouver's rental market is obscenely pet-hostile, which rules out three-quarters of the possible hits right there, and biased towards Tiny Yet Overpriced, which doesn't work well with our library. And I strongly suspect, on admittedly very little hard evidence, that in the last year-plus there's been a proliferation of apartments being rented on AirBnB rather than to full-time tenants, because owners can make more money for less hassle that way.

So ... we're looking into buying a place. We're still cheapskates, but interest rates are low enough that that's only a problem and not a complete block. We're still picky; that hasn't changed, and if anything we'll be more picky if we're going to be someplace permanently. Though not a lot more picky, since neither of have a good grasp on what "living someplace permanently" means. That's, like, four years, right? And the Vancouver housing market is terrible but it's likely to *stay* terrible, so at least we probably won't lose money by buying in at the top of the bubble, unlike certain siblings of mine.

Fun times.

(Feel free to amuse yourself by browsing the MLS listings for Vancouver, in case you thought I was kidding about "decades-old housing bubble that shows no sign of popping.")

Comments

[green_knight]

Hi from London. Recently a one-bedroom apartment in our not-very-great part of town, in a really-not-great estate sold for £250.000. That's a quarter of a million pounds. The reason I love homeownership is that my partner - by luck of draw - got in early. We're now paying a quarter of what we'd have to pay in rent, which is the main reason we're living in London, because we could not afford to rent.

I know this experience won't work as well for everyone, but in this country at least, renting is a nightmare, and London doubly so. (My last landlord kicked me out and hiked the rent by a quarter. Not that my rent had been low.)

Best of luck in finding a good place.

[jazzfish]

Oof. Vancouver is not *quite* that bad, I don't think; the CAD$500,000 "bachelor suites" are all at least in the desirable parts of town.

I really do worry that if we don't find a place now, we're not going to be able to find one later. And I *like* it here. I'd rather not have to uproot again. I don't even know where we'd go.

In the "small favours" department, Vancouver does have some sort of rent-control laws in place. Where we're at rent hasn't risen since we moved in, and the previous place didn't have a rent increase in the three years we were there. But there's a lot of "oh, the tenant moved out? i'll slap a new coat of paint on it, claim i 'refurbished,' and double the rent" going on.

[novel_machinist]

I don't know if this pertains to you guys, but we found that renting in the city here is way more expensive than buying was. We have a ton of space and apparently my wife doesn't mind mowing (I'm allergic to grass). It's not much different for us than it was renting, just free laundry, cheaper, and a ton more space. Sure there's stuff we want to do, but none of it is urgent and we can now save money to have SOMEONE ELSE do said projects.

[jazzfish]

All I want is to live somewhere like Greenwich Village in the 1960s, like Jane Jacobs in Death & Life Of Great American Cities, is that so much to ask? (Don't answer that.)

Seriously though, I do hope that buying will ultimately turn out to be cheaper, and maybe with less stress as well. And I am so very on board with the idea of paying people who know what they're doing to do the Endless Household Projects.

[wohali]

Highly recommended for laughs/cries: https://twitter.com/dearYVRlandlord

My partner travels into YVR for work regularly and even the AirBnB prices are nuts. The last place he stayed in, the bedroom was actually a balcony that barely held the bed. I am not sure what the major malfunction is as compared to here in Toronto, but I do not envy your search in the slightest. :(

[jazzfish]

That twitter account ... dear gord. It is not only worse than I'd imagined, it's worse than I could have imagined.

Some of it's probably foreign money coming in, some of it's an actual land shortage (mountains to the north, ocean to the west, US to the south, the only direction to spread is east), some of it's the provincial government treating Vancouver like their own personal ATM and the city government being happily complicit... but I dunno. I can't make it all add up either. :(

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Prices like here--insane.

[jazzfish]

Yeah. Insane, and unsustainable, and still somehow sustained. :( New York and coastal Cali are the only places that seem at all comparable to the Vancouver madness. Even DC wasn't this bad.