Dream of Metro Vancouver ownership has ‘shifted’: key real estate player
Posted April 19, 2018 3:08 pm.
Last Updated April 19, 2018 5:57 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – With rising prices putting most homes out of reach for many would-be buyers, is the dream of ownership in Metro Vancouver dead?
Andrew Ramlo, a vice-president with the Rennie marketing group, says it’s not.
“I don’t think the dream is dead. The dream is just different than what everybody expects it to be. I don’t think we all should be expecting to live on the West Side of Vancouver in a single, detached house and pay under a million dollars,” he tells NEWS 1130.
“The average dream is not dead. The average dream is different. A single, detached home with a picket fence, yeah, I think that that is actually dead for a lot of people, but what the current generation of people moving into the housing market want, a condo and as they transition into family formation, well, people are going to want at least a little bit of green, so that they can have a Mr. Turtle pool or the sandbox for the kids to play in.”
Speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Urban Development Institute, Ramlo also says we need to stop blaming foreign buyers for driving up housing prices in Metro Vancouver because those sales started dropping in March of 2016 and BC’s foreign buyers tax didn’t take effect until that summer (August).
“Data from the province, it shows that in terms of foreign occupancy, we’re in the range of four to five per cent. It’s not rampant. It doesn’t represent a quarter or two-thirds of the local market.”
However, Ramlo admits he doesn’t know how many high-end properties have been bought by non-locals.
“No. The provincial government, they just make the roll ups available to us, so I would be happy if somebody were to present me with those data and I’d been more than happy to look at them. I’m sure that I could find certain price points and certain geographies where it is way more prominent than the five per cent that characterizes the whole market.”
Attorney General David Eby says Doctor Peter German, the same expert who recently found evidence of money laundering in local casinos, will soon investigate how widespread that problem is in real estate.
Read: Andrew Ramlo’s presentation at the Urban Development Institute luncheon (Source: UDI)
