Some Interesting Statistics on Housing in Vancouver

All data is from the 2006 census from Statistics Canada.

The total number of households in Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area: 817,225
Total owners: 531,725
Total renters: 285,045

Change since 2001:
Households: +7.7%
Owners: +14.9%
Renters: -3.6%

Not surprisingly the number of owners rose in the 4 years between 2001 and 2006 but I didn't thiink it would be double the rate of population increase. Surprisingly, the count of people renting fell between 2001 and 2006 even though the population increased.

Percentage of households owning: 65.1%
Percentage of households renting: 34.9%

Number of households spending more than 30% of income on shelter: 265,870
Renters spending more than 30% of income on shelter: 123,050
Owners spending more than 30% of income on shelter: 142,815

Those numbers of people spending more than 30% of household income on shelter costs are just sickening. I had no idea there were so many people in that kind of dire financial position. We are talking about 1/4 of the entire population of the greater vancouver area. I suppose that single people who make average incomes or lower would comprise the majority of those spending 30% or more in addition to the overextended home debtor.

Real Estate Price Changes in the Greater Vancouver Area

Well the model predicted a slowing of the 6 month price change but much steeper decline that was witnessed. Partially, this is due to a real pick up in sales during the latter part of the month of May relieving some of the inventory pressure and causing the month to be a little more on the moderate side.

Sales will likely need to fall further and inventory continue to climb for us to see meaningful price drops. Once the price drops start then its game over for the speculators and super-leveraged. I don't know how anyone has really been able to afford the purchase of a home in the Vancouver area the past entire 3 years but the sales pace is finally slowing and that buyer exhaustion point has been reached or at least pretty close.

Prices in the REBGV area for the benchmark single family home did drop last month and it could very well mean that April was the price top. We will see.

Photos of the Real Estate Bubble-hood

FVREB May 2008

The Fraser Valley Real Estate Board released their monthly statistic package to the public and here are the highlights.

Listings are up - - WAY UP. 33% higher than last year.

Sales are down - - WAY DOWN. 25% lower than last year.

Consequently the Months of Inventory is high for this time of year at 7 MOI.

Note regarding active listings - the FVREB decided to change the way they calculate active listings to a more accurate method but it limits our ability to compare year over year changes to inventory. Using the previous method, inventory would have been approximately 12,400 for an increase of 47% YOY and a MOI of 7.8.

Median Prices were up for detached (1.4%) and down for townhouses (-1.3%) and apartments (-2.2%). Low quality is the first to suffer during a real estate downturn like we are entering right now. The lower quality areas, structures, and housing types go down first and most.

We are well on our way to having negative Year over Year price changes with current annual appreciation for the House Price Index coming in at a lowly 4.5%. I fully expect that number to be negative by fall. The House Price Index in some lower quality areas is already in negative YOY% territory - see the press release for more details.

The price change model using months of inventory to predict future price movements is working well with a predicted MOM% price decline for the next few months on average.

REBGV May 2008 Stats

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver has not released the stats package for May yet but courtesy of Paul B we have much of the data beforehand. Aside from the important price data we can look at sales and inventory to see where the trends may be. As soon as the stats package is released we will look at it in more detail.

Sales were 29% off last year. This is the drop off in sales that I was looking for in order to conclude that 2008 would be the year our correction starts. Indeed it looks like it is happening and future months will allow us to be even more conclusive or not.


One of these things is not like the other! Active Listings have shot up dramatically after a slow start to the year. The active listings are rising due to increased listing activity and a slowdown in buying activity.


One of the more conclusive elements of the data is the non-typical rise in Months of Inventory during May.


More on prices to come later.

The model that jesse and I worked on earlier in the month to correlate inventory with price changes would suggest a monthly price decline of -4% +/- 2% approximately. I am not too confident in the model because we just don't have enough data to be terribly accurate yet but it gives us a 'best guess' and that is better than nothing.