Home prices

[Steve]

How have the home prices been in your area? I found this statistic to be amazing and wanted to share it with you. At housing’s bottom, many will be priced out - The traditional benchmark is that housing costs shouldn't exceed 28 percent of a household's gross monthly income. Strikingly, in nearly half of the 40 major metro areas studied, households earning 120 percent of the median income fell short of the affordability benchmark. We seem to still have a long way to go before we hit a bottom. If it is even to be reached! What's your view on this?

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[musician/lawnman]

Lawn care business tips

Times are hard, though I kinda wish I didn't own a home right now. It is the time to buy here. & for a little more than I spent in 03 (before the big market spike) I could be in nearly twice the house now. I just know I won't be able to sell the one I own now & don't want to deal with renting it & tenants & eviction notices, paying 2 mortgages etc. People are going to have to expand out of the metro areas. It's a natural thing. From the begining... along the beaches & rivers were valued land due to the water access back then that's how goods were moved. cities built around these areas. Now the cities are where the jobs are yes, but there are more people on the planet & in the country thus the land is worth even more as it's now in short supply. People can't live in each others laps. So if you wanna be there you pay $$$$$ big. As people move in & really populate rural areas little towns become bigger cities & their property value goes up too. It's not gonna stop anytime soon... buy a peice of the rock now, it'll be worth more tommorow (metaphorically speaking... it might be a year or 2)

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[Steve]

Very interesting! Have you gotten a chance to meet any people in your area that are involved with real estate investing? Buying, fixing up and selling or holding on and renting?

[musician/lawnman]

no not really, if you had the money it's a good time to buy & hold em here. It's selling & renting that will put you in the poor house or insane asylum around here. Talk about loosing your butt.

I am definitely a believer in the fact that property will appreciate over time, since people are still making the move from rural to urban, and the population is growing. That being said, if you live in a rapidly declining city (i.e. Detroit) where supply far outpaces demand, values will drop.

Here in Vancouver, the average detached home price is $921,000 according to the most recent figure I could find. Our last assessment came in at $1.8 million for a 2,000ish sq ft house on a 62' x 122' lot in a fairly upscale, but not overly opulent neighbourhood...(this is my parents house, not mine...I'm 20). That was a 23% increase from last year for no apparent reason. They even appreciated the value of our buildings, which we made no improvements to...I don't know how that works, since technically any asset other than land is supposed to depreciate over time unless you make some sort of improvement or investment to it...but hey, this is Vancouver, where a fairly average house is worth $1.8 million, so I guess it's never really going to make sense.

As a point of reference, I believe the house was purchased somewhere in the $300K range in 1988.

[Steve]

Those are some big figures. I forgot how the US dollar translates to the Canadian dollar at the moment.

It's roughly par...Vancouver is just out of control when it comes to the real estate market. A studio condo downtown in a high rise is about the only thing you can get for less than $500K...once you actually have a bedroom, you start going up and up.

[Steve]

WOW!

Ya, it's a bit of an issue. I'd like to live in Vancouver when I graduate college, but it's hard to do without throwing money out the window on a rental apartment until you can muster up enough for a down payment on a condo, since you can't afford to buy a house these days until you're 35 or 40 if you have an amazing job...

The government just banned no down payment mortgages and 40 year amortization too...which is kind of a pain, but I guess they want to avoid the whole "mortgage meltdown" that's been happening in the US.