Greater Vancouver Market Snapshot September 2013

Below are updated sales, inventory and months of inventory graphs for Greater Vancouver to September 2013. (see REBGV news releases) (click on image to enlarge)

The scatterplot of 6 month price changes and months of inventory is below. The most recent datum is the brown dot at about (MOI=6.3,price_change=3%) . The trend is roughly in line with past years.

The other graph I have added is the price-rent ratio for a Greater Vancouver apartment, using REBGV apartment MLS-HPI and CMHC-reported rents (extrapolated, as they are only reported once per year), normalized to January 2005. By this measure, price-rent is currently 15% above its value in 2005 and 27-64% above the range of values from 1992-2004. 

A caveat about this graph is that it aggregates various price tiers and municipalities into one. If higher valued apartments have appreciated more than lower valued ones this would mean price-rent on the lower end is lower than this graph would indicate (and vice versa). Put another way, price data may have been skewed by higher-tier purchases appreciating faster than the lower-tier ones. Lower tier apartments may be more likely to be rented out, in which case from an investment perspective the price-rent ratio in the graph below may be on the high side.

My estimates for August were for inventory of 16663 (actual 16155) and sales of 2353 (actual 2483) based on estimating average changes from August of years 2005-2012. Using the same technique estimates inventory and sales for October of 15605 and 2657 respectively (MOI=5.9).