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JOHN MA CKIE

More from John Mackie (HTTP://VANCOUVERSUN.COM/AUTHOR/JOHNMACKIESUN)

Published on: January 8, 2018 | Last Updated: January 8, 2018 7:35 PM PST

Almost three-quarters of the single, detached

homes in Metro Vancouver are now assessed at $1
million or higher, a 50-per-cent increase from
2014. And the “million-dollar line” has spread deep
into the suburbs.
“(What used to be) the top crust of residential real estate in Metropolitan
Vancouver has now become the whole loaf,” said Andy Yan, director of the

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City Program at Simon Fraser University.

Yan analyzed data from B.C. Assessment for 2018 and found 73 per cent
of single-family homes in the region now top $1 million, including over 99
per cent of the homes in Vancouver, West Vancouver, the City of North
Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands.

Houses in the District of North Vancouver, Burnaby and Lions Bay all top
97 per cent, followed by Richmond at 96.8 per cent and White Rock at
93.1 per cent.

What may surprise people is that 89.6 per cent of the houses in Port
Moody are now assessed at $1 million, along with 82.6 per cent in
Coquitlam and 75.6 per cent in New Westminster.

“In the history of the region the single, detached home was up until
recently attainable at a quite modest (price), particularly outside certain
neighbourhoods within the city of Vancouver,” said Yan. “Now, (million-
dollar homes are) kind of spread out over the entire region. And you’ve
got to remember this is just strictly on assessment values — we haven’t
even included ‘transportation mortgages,’ (which is) the role of

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transportation costs over the lifetime of these units.

“Once you kick in transportation costs, everything is over a million

dollars.”

Assessment values for single-family homes throughout Metro Vancouver, showing the rise
in prices between 2014 and 2018. V S U N W P

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Assessment values for single-family homes by city in Metro Vancouver.

The number of million-dollar assessments drops as you go south of the

Fraser River and further east.

Fifty-one per cent of single, detached houses in Surrey are assessed at $1

million or higher, followed by 47. 2 per cent in Delta, 45.7 in Langley
Township and 34 in Port Coquitlam. Maple Ridge (11.2), the city of
Langley (9.1) and Pitt Meadows (5.9) have the lowest number of homes
assessed at $1 million.

Yan released his first million-dollar map of the City of Vancouver in 2011,
and it showed a stark division along Main Street, with the west side over
$1 million and the east side under.

“I used to focus predominately on the city of Vancouver, because they

were the first ones to make their data available through their open data
catalogue,” he explained.

But as the real-estate boom spread, B.C. Assessment gave him access to
their data, and he started charting the suburbs.

Yan has put together maps to show the location of million-dollar homes
throughout the region, using red for million-dollar homes, blue for under a
million.

Shown side-by-side, they look like a wildfire spreading throughout Metro.

“In 2014, about 23 per cent homes in Metropolitan Vancouver were over a
million dollars,” said Yan. “They were concentrated in West Vancouver,
parts of North Vancouver and the west side of Vancouver and the
University Endowment Lands, (plus) parts of the upper northwest corner
of Richmond and South Surrey-White Rock.”

Now, the million-dollar homes are virtually everywhere. But Yan cautions
that there is a lot of diversity in the million-dollar homes.

“As much as we’d like to think these are all 5,000 or 8,000-square-feet,
single, detached homes, there’s actually a tremendous diversity within

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this population,” he said. “A lot of the single, detached homes on the east
side of Vancouver have a lot of affordable rental built into them — they
have a lot of accessory units that aren’t necessarily counted officially.”

Another map shows the percentage of single-family, residential properties

by value range. Almost 11 per cent of houses in Metro are assessed at $2
million to $3 million, four per cent at $3 million to $4 million, 1.9 per cent
at $4 million to $5 million and 1.9 per cent at over $5 million.

The $5-million line is along the West Van waterfront and British
Properties, along with much of the endowment lands, West Point Grey,
Shaughnessy, Kerrisdale and Southlands. But there are pockets of
$5-million homes north of Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano, along the Cambie
Corridor and in Dunbar.

“Dunbar and Kerrisdale used to be middle-class neighbourhoods,” said

Yan. “These are neighbourhoods that were created by fairly modest
incomes.”

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Assessment values for single-family homes throughout Metro Vancouver, showing how
much property is worth in various areas.

Josh Gordon of Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy said

Vancouverites have become “kind of numb” to sky-high, real-estate
prices, but the fact that 73 per cent of homes in the entire Lower Mainland
are over $1 million is “quite a remarkable statistic.”

“What’s particularly striking is the extent to which prices are

disconnected from incomes in Vancouver,” said Gordon, an assistant
professor at SFU. “A million dollars relative to a Vancouver income is
(almost 14) times the average median income. That’s very high. The
typical ratio in urban Canada would be about four, and we’re way beyond
that.”

Gordon said that high ratio “suggests it’s something other than local
incomes that are driving housing prices.”

“In a way it’s a reflection of the ripple effect,” he said, “where money from
abroad has arrived into the high end of the market and has gradually
pushed up housing values across the market, not merely at the high end.”

jmackie@postmedia.com (mailto:jmackie@postmedia.com)

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Assessment values for single-family homes throughout Metro Vancouver, showing the rise
in prices between 2014 and ’18. A N D Y Y A N / P N G

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A flood of king
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1 Comment Sort by Newest

Byron Ng
Just goes show why PhDs are know as permanent something lol . Nobody is entitled to a cheap
house in the best areas - move somewhere cheaper
Like · Reply · 14 mins

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