Shelley Fralic
Sun
One of the oddest things about the Vancouver-area housing market, and it was never more so than in the current dark economic shadow of the American subprime mortgage crisis and the dizzying roller-coaster ride that is the stock market, is that everyone thinks of real estate in terms of investment.
We chart local housing starts with zeal, from the shoebox condo towers popping up like glass teeth in Yaletown to the million-dollar mansions being bulldozed out of mountainsides in Whistler, hanging on every word about upswings and downward trends uttered by the growing legion of housing experts.
Next to latte addiction and breaking and entering, real estate is the hottest hobby in town.
Everyone wants to know what’s selling and where, for how much and who’s buying, so we take mental notes on house prices, follow neighbourhood listings, bookmark sites like mls.ca, eyeball mortgage rates, pop into open houses and, of course, chat endlessly about real estate in the Safeway produce aisle and on the cocktail circuit. And the conversation, these days, goes something like this:
“Did you see the Smith place is up for sale? Would have been $100,000 more last year.”
“This so-called correction is killing my equity.”
“Do you think it’s going to get worse before it gets better?”
Geez. Doesn’t anyone buy a house just to live in any more?
There was a time, and I’m not making this up, when Metro Vancouver wasn’t always real-estate mad. There was a time when people actually scrimped and saved, went to the bank with a down payment and signed a 25-year mortgage.
Time was, you bought a house, you stayed put.
Oh, Mom and Dad knew their house was the family’s biggest asset, but it’s not like they sat around studying equity tables in the glow of The Ed Sullivan Show.
No question we pay a mighty high price to live in paradise. Which is why it’s so strange of late that we’ve been collectively bemoaning the downward blip in the value of local real estate instead of celebrating, for the first time in recent memory, an actual buyers’ market in B.C., with lots of inventory and more affordability, especially for first-time buyers.
Does it matter so much that your home’s value might fluctuate in price over time, or that the profit on its future sale won’t be the bonanza we expect?
If you’re smart enough, or perhaps just lucky enough, to own a home here, or this soft market means you might finally be able to buy a home, then think of it as winning the lottery and stop worrying about that which you can’t control.
Simplistic? Perhaps.
But if we could somehow revisit the nostalgic notion that a house is a home, worth working for and worth hanging on to, instead of an odds-on chip at a poker table or an IOU on instant wealth, we might all sleep better at night.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008