Nearly all of us have been told that we will do well in life if we always ‘aim high’. While that can apply to accomplishments along any career path, when you look at it from the perspective of a real estate agent it is best paired with a real hunger for $. You can make any judgment you like about the propriety of that, but it is what it is. Nearly all of the most successful realtors make no apologies for their love of earning the biggest commissions and earning them over their competitors.

It’s always been true that if you’re going to have success in this business, you do need to have a naturally competitive side to you. As this is a competitive business no matter how you slice and no matter where in the world you’re working as a real estate agent. Some people will say you need to be a ‘go-getter’ and here at Real Estate Leads we definitely agree with that. Our online real estate lead generation system is an excellent resource for new realtors who are in fact go-getters and would like to get to the ‘getting’ of it all sooner rather than later.

Building a name for yourself in this business is all important, and then identifying opportunities where you can make the big money working as a real estate agent.

Which leads us to today’s topic, and one we simply need to share with our readership base here considering the safe assumption that all of you are realtors. This one will be relevant to realtors who work in our neck of the woods here, and in one of Canada’s most desirable housing markets – Vancouver.

$500K To Be Had On Top of Commissions

We’ll also assume you have access to the MLS, and if you’re a Vancouver realtor then you should be familiarizing yourself with one particular listing at the Alberni Tower development at the corner of Alberni and Cardero in the city’s west end. Unit 3902 at 1150 Alberni Street, to be exact.

This building will not complete until 2021, but sales of these units are picking up steam as the building promises the very best in upscale condo living in the city.

The listing price for this extremely spacious and well-appointed unit is in the vicinity of 14 million, and yes that’s a price tag that will eliminate a LOT of potential buyers. But if you’re familiar with Vancouver and what buyers are willing to pay for homes here, it still leaves plenty of potential buyers on the horizon.

And so here’s the deal – if you bring the seller a buyer who completes their purchase of this home, the seller if offering a $500,000 bonus on top of the 3.22% commission rate on the first $100K and then 1.15% on the remaining balance. It’s estimated that the realtor will walk away with something in the vicinity of $661,700 and it’s believed this could well be the highest bonus ever recorded.

Exceptional Condo Home

We’re sure you can do your homework, but to just touch on what this home has going for it; 4,030 sq. ft with three bedrooms, four bathrooms, a spacious locker, two parking spaces, and a private Japanese-inspired garden on the balcony. The building itself has intricate designs, an expansive moss garden, a pool, hot tub and sauna, a Japanese restaurant, a 24-hour concierge, and commercial spaces at the bottom of the building.

If you have a buyer who’d like the sound of that and has the financial means to purchase this home, it’s high time to get a move on and make yourself some serious money!

Sign up with Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to you exclusively. You’ll be the only realtor to receive these leads, and they will be for prospective clients that are living in the city or town in Canada where you are working as a real estate agent. What these leads do is create an immediate opportunity for you to be in touch first with these people and convince them they will be best served by having you as their realtor.

It’s entirely natural that the majority of new home building starts in metro areas of the country are for multi-family housing and not for detached single-family dwelling homes. After all, it’s not like there’s any new land being created and in areas like Vancouver the decision makers realize that the scarcity of land that is available for development is much better earmarked for multi-family housing developments.

Not only do these types of homes offer more housing in regions where there’s a real demand for it and ongoing shortages, but they also tend to be better uses of the space and often are more energy-efficient housing developments too. Then there’s the more pressing and basic reality that for many qualified home buyers a home in a multi-family development is much more in line with what they can afford.

There is of course a real shift downwards in regard to what that means of commissions earning for realtors who’d ideally sell detached homes, but the market is what it is and that’s always going to be true. Real estate also doesn’t become anything of a less competitive business either. That’s why our online real estate lead generation service here at Real Estate Leads is such a smart choice, no matter where you’re working as a real estate agent in Canada.

Qualified leads on prospective buyers or sellers who are ready to make a move, what’s not to like about the sound of that?

But enough about that, let’s look at what’s behind the swell in multi-family housing purchasing options in Vancouver.

Something of a ‘Back to Normal’

Vancouver’s multi-residential property market is coming back from the COVID pause with an emphatic flurry and an uptick in transaction activity.

Now plain and simple what’s happening here is people are buying and selling for all of the reasons they were before, but the trend is accelerated at this point in 2020 because people want to get back to their lives and arranging their future.

In truth though, the pent-up demand in the multi-residential market goes back to the early part of 2019. That’s when investors and sellers stayed on the sideline waiting for changes in municipal and provincial policies to be clarified, so with all that in place and the ‘worst’ economic predictions for economy and market being disproven it’s now that we’re seeing a really flurry of resumed activity.

Keep in mind as well that there are so many different types of owners, investors, and developers that come from throughout the world, and those people are seeing just how well B.C. weathered the storm compared to the rest of the world during COVID.

Then of course there’s the fact that Vancouver is still seen as one of the most desirable places to live. It’s entirely true that there is a diverse buyers’ market in the city, including professionals such as doctors and dentists diversifying their investments and entrepreneurs seeing value in bringing older buildings up to modern standards and either living in them themselves or reintroducing them to the market at a later date.

Multi-Family Homes Continuing to Go Fast

Multi-family rental is moving especially quickly in Vancouver right now, and that’s being seen in other metro areas of the country too. This is in part because of the Feds’ keeping interest rates low, with the cost of money being low working to insulate the economy at a time when that’s very much needed.

There’s then a direct translation between that and developers’ enthusiasm for building multi-family home developments. Look at these examples of new multi-family developments in Vancouver, ones that if they go ahead (and they very likely will) will see the homes within them purchased quickly and at value in all likelihood.

• Edgewater site on Pacific Street two blocks from Sunset Beach in the Burrard Corridor,
• A 6-storey rental development site at Main and East 33rd that saw a bidding war between five different developers
• A mixed-use high-rise site in Surrey listed at $33.8 million

Among many other examples you can find that highlight the resiliency and ongoing strength of the Vancouver real estate market. Good news for everyone living in Lotus Land and in all the surrounding bedroom communities of Vancouver too, and of course real estate agents included. Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to you exclusively. They are leads on homebuyers and sellers in your area of whichever city or town you’re living / working in, and again you are the only realtor who will receive these leads. From there you have an opportunity to be in touch with these people first and the chance to convince them that you are the professional they need to help them with buying or selling homes.

Go back 7 months of so and generally speaking people taking an interest in the future of the housing market in Canada were of two camps generally; those that thought it wouldn’t weather the COVID 19 pandemic storm particularly well, and those who expected it would be a lot more resilient than people would give it credit for. Well, here we are spring of 2020 a very distant blip in the rearview mirror and it appears the people in that second camp were right.

That’s because, as we’ve seen, the housing market has actually heated up overall and the many different reasons that people explained would factor into that outcome have proved to be legit. People have talked about the ‘pent-up demand’ factor, people have talked about the always-relevant supply and demand factors, and then of course there’s ongoing buyer prerogative shifts that have factored into this too.

And before we get into the meat of discussing this, we should say that an increasingly valuable housing market in Canada is overall a good thing for the country. Real estate routinely makes up nearly half of Canada’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth, and so even if you’re one of the people who decries the cost of real estate in Canada you still can’t deny that you and every other Canadian is benefiting from it in a more indirect but very tangible way.

Yes, the way this benefits those with careers in real estate is a part of our way of looking at this. That doesn’t, however, make the business any more of a potentially lucrative one than it ever has been previously. Realtors will know that real estate is a very competitive business, and that’s why our online real estate lead generation service in Canada here at Real Estate Leads is so highly recommended for realtors who are newer to the business.

Just last week the Bank of Canada (BOC) weighed in on all of this, and their belief regarding it is one that’s in line with those who either have equity in real estate or are working to help those people as real estate industry professionals.

Gov’t Free to Intervene, but National Bank Won’t

The BOC knows full well that emergency pandemic policies are inflating house prices, but BOC GovernorTiff Macklem has stated it’s not the central Bank’s place to be interfering in the market, and that’s a prudent understanding for many different reasons.

The BOC has stated that it intends to keep the emergency measures ― rock-bottom interest rates, purchases of Canadian mortgages and government debt ― in place for the foreseeable future, and stated further that soaring house prices won’t change the Bank’s direction. Their commitment to keep interest rates low is unwavering at this time, but Macklem did state that if too many Canadian households move towards becoming dangerously over-leveraged then policy-makers have several tools they can put into place to counter that.

The mortgage-interest stress test is integral to that, and it’s very much of an ‘ain’t broke don’t fix it’ type of situation at this time. Other of these tools include government regulation measures like mortgage insurance, foreign buyers’ taxes or empty-home taxes.

.

The BOC then stated further that they will keep their administered (interest) rate pinned down for the next few years, even if that policy contributes to increasing vulnerabilities. Should those vulnerabilities come around then the Bank would look to other policymakers to contain any growing risks, given that raising rates prematurely would also stunt the recovery.

Wait & See Mode

The average resale price of a home in Canada went up by 18 per cent in August, compared to a year earlier, one of the strongest gains on record despite the ongoing economic crisis.

Economists are crediting the Bank’s lowering of interest rates this year as a foremost reason for this. It’s been estimated that the drop in mortgage rates over the past year has increased buyers’ maximum purchase price by 24%.

This means greater numbers of qualified buyers are able to get into the types of homes they need for themselves and / or their families, and there shouldn’t be anything that anyone should disapprove of with that.

It’s also true that to this point the federal government has not taken any steps to cool house price growth, and its FTHBIA plan (First Time Home Buyer Income Assistance) is intended to be a ‘demand-side’ policy that would increase the amount of money Canadians can spend on a home. It’s unlikely to reduce house price growth, and it was never expected to do so despite what some people had hoped it would do.

Another very integral factor here is that Canadian cities are suffering from a chronic shortage of housing, and this is pushing up prices. This is something that doesn’t look like it will be going away anytime soon, and it’s a reality that people need to address head on rather than wishing it were otherwise.

BOC Leery of Raising Rates – 500 Billion Reasons Why

The pile of reason the BOC will want not to raise interest rates to slow soaring house prices is a mammoth one. For starters it fears that higher borrowing costs will sink the many people and businesses who loaded up on debt before and during the pandemic. Next we have them dropping their key lending rate to near zero and buying hundreds of billions of dollars of debt ― including around $100 billion of federal government debt and billions more in Canadian mortgages.

This was done in an effort to pre-empt what could have been a major financial crisis, something that would be bad for everyone, including those who are displeased with the cost of housing and how it’s a barrier to their getting into the market.

The BOC has also increased its balance sheet by $500 billion since the spring, injecting this much new cash into the economy, in the form of debt owed to the Bank. Central banks have pushed down interest rates, making it more affordable for households, businesses and governments to weather the crisis. This is called ‘quantitative easing’, and while it’s a good thing in the biggest picture it does always cause asset prices to skyrocket.

This is a more detailed and causation view into why Canada’s average home sales prices are soaring in the middle of a pandemic. Can this change in the future? Absolutely it can, but we need to question whether or not that would be a good thing for ALL of us and not just a select few who’d like to see home values decrease.

For the very foreseeable future, that’s not happening.

Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to one realtor, and one realtor only – YOU. These leads will be for the region of any city or town in Canada where you are based and practicing real estate. It makes it possible for you to be fast-tracked to being in touch with individuals or couples who are genuinely considering making a move in the local real estate market. Check out our testimonials page to see how realtors just like you are thrilled with what our service has done for them.

The brain trust here at Real Estate Leads is fortunate to have a very ‘bird’s eye’ view of the Vancouver Real Estate market due to the fact we’re both residents and homeowners here in ‘Lotus Land’. If we’re to look at it from the ‘comparatively speaking’ perspective and in comparison to real estate elsewhere in Canada, homes and property here have always been more expensive compared to elsewhere in the country and that’s not going to change.

It’s one of the most desirable places to live in the world, and many internationally-based surveys have found it to be among the most ‘livable’ cities in the world. If you can look past the mind-boggling congestion and surreally bad traffic, that’s probably true for the most part. But you see, all those people means the supply and demand part of the equation is always going to be tilted towards demand when it comes to housing and real estate.

This is why the recent news from the REBGV that Vancouver had its best September on record this year in terms of the number of homes sold doesn’t come as a big surprise. Yes, COVID has harmed the economy and taken would-be qualified buyers off that list to some extent, but the Vancouver market HAS stayed insulated from market volatilities in the exact way most people predicted it would.

Which, if you ask us, is the way it should be. The people who have equity in their homes have for the most part worked very hard to build that up. They very much deserve to have the same market they had to work hard to buy be defined by the same dynamics when they choose to sell in it.

There are fewer home sellers these days, however, and we touched on that a few weeks back here. Here at Real Estate Leads, our online real estate lead generation service is an excellent way to put realtors like you in a better position to grow their client base in the current challenging environment.

Alright, let’s take a longer look at this good news coming from Vancouver.

56.2% Jump

The news release from the REBGV said that 3,643 homes were sold in September, and that’s up 56.2 per cent from the 2,333 that went onto the market and were sold in September of last year. Sales were also up 19.6 per cent from the 3,047 homes sold in August, and this type of resiliency is EXACTLY what we’d like to see in housing markets all across the country if that were at all possible.

This is joined by the MLS home price index composite benchmark price for all residential properties hitting $1,041,300 in September, up just under 6% from September 2019. And as we look further at the absolute nature of supply / demand equation as it pertains to Vancouver housing, the wave of homes that hit the market last month was not enough to keep up with demand.

So what happens then? It’s not rocket science – low supply has pushed prices higher, and one can only imagine how much more pronounced that trend will be once the economy moves into a COVID-19 recovery.

There were 6,402 properties newly listed for sale in September, up 10.1 per cent from August. But the sales-to-active listings ratio — a key metric used to analyze home prices — was 27.8 per cent, above the 20 per cent threshold where prices tend to rise.

Relation to Rents

Many reputable sources have indicated that – at least to some extent – the pandemic is pushing rents down in Vancouver. That’s somewhat true, and also somewhat not true.

Experts says low interest rates and changing housing needs during the COVID-19 pandemic have also influenced the market, which is recovering from a lockdown that put the brakes on sales in the spring selling season.

Some 730 attached homes (townhomes and rowhomes most commonly) were sold by Vancouver real estate agents last month, and that’s going along with 1,317 detached homes in September. Further, sales in both categories went up more than 70% from the same time a year ago.

Ad to that the biggest share of sales at 1,596 were for apartments, and that too is up 36.9% year-over-year. A big part of that is related to the median level of affordability, and of course the shortcomings there are related to years of government policies that have created wealth and earning capacity disparities in the city.

Then there’s detached homes, which are the most desirable purchasing options for families for obvious reasons, and especially now that many of them have had a taste of what a lockdown involves. We have biggest price appreciation right here. At $1,507,500, the benchmark price of Vancouver detached homes in September was up 7.8% from September 2019.

Realtors in Vancouver face stiff competition, but generally speaking it’s still an advantageous environment for those who want to make a living working in real estate.

Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads that are delivered to one realtor, and one realtor only. That’s you, and all of these leads are for the region of any city or town in Canada where you are working as a real estate agent. It’s an excellent way to maximize the returns you get for your client prospecting efforts, and you’ll quickly see it as part of your marketing budget that’s definitely well spent.