Interesting facts
From the Multiple Listing Service. (Actually, since not everyone is likely to be interested in the Canadian real estate market, the rest is below the fold.[1] Also, because it’s mostly tables of numbers with the occasional comment.)
Every month, an average of more than 1.7 million unique visitors visit the www.mls.ca web site. Each unique visitor, on average, visits the site three times a month and spends an average of 20 minutes per visit*. (What does MLS mean?)
For the record, I probably visit the site three times a week, but spend about 5-10 minutes each time. Well. Maybe 5 times a week? It’s updated daily, so you can’t really blame me.
But what’s more interesting to me — and, maybe, MS (I need to call her something other than the name of a disease)? — is the interactive pricing map.
National average for 04/2005 (all numbers are in thousands): 248. For 2004: 228. So, things cost about 10% more than a year ago. (All my percentages will be approximate, by the way, because I’m too lazy to estimate more accurately than to the closest multiple of 5.)
Let’s look at some provinces/territories (weirdly, no info for Nunavut) — this will be the April 2005 number followed by the April 2004 number.
| BC | 324 | 292 |
| Ontario | 265 | 248 |
| Quebec | 186 | 172 |
| Alberta | 219 | 192 |
| Sask | 123 | 111 |
| Man | 136 | 122 |
| N&L | 145 | 124 |
| PEI | 119 | 108 |
| NS | 164 | 148 |
| NB | 118 | 115 |
| Yukon | 195 | 152 |
| NWT | 227 | 238 |
The Northwest Territories are worth 5% less than they were a year ago — but the Yukon is worth 30% more. The NWT are still worth an awful lot *more* than the Yukon though, which sort of surprises me.
And more than Quebec, which doesn’t surprise me, because it’s just Montreal driving Quebec up, more or less. And there are a lot of condos there. I don’t really get why Newfoundland is so popular, or NB not (I do know why NS is bigger than the other Atlantic provinces).
The city facts are neat also.
| St John’s | 146 | 125 |
| Halifax | 189 | 172 |
| Fredericton | 125 | 124 |
| Saint John | 116 | 111 |
| Quebec City | 143 | 126 |
| Montreal | 201 | 191 |
| Ottawa | 248 | 241 |
| Toronto | 342 | 321 |
| Regina | 125 | 111 |
| Saskatoon | 147 | 136 |
| Calgary | 249 | 220 |
| Edmonton | 192 | 179 |
| Vancouver | 413 | 378 |
| Victoria | 457 | 384 |
May 31st, 2005 at 3:44 pm
It doesn’t surprise me that Calgary is more expensive than Edmonton and on par with Ottawa. Calgary is where the money and the millionaires are in Alberta. Anytime you put a bunch of people together who can pay anything for anything, prices go up.
I have another couple of years before I start obsessively checking MLS. I do have friends who are looking now. They’re also addicted to the on-line mortgage calculator.
May 31st, 2005 at 7:29 pm
Hmmm, I’m not entirely sure what “single-family homes” means. Does this include a lot of one and two bedroom condos? I’m in Van, and those numbers seem awfully low. Maybe in my looking I have just already excluded places where one wouldn’t want to live and unappealing “Vancouver specials” (thereby pricing myself out of the market). Sigh… this is depressing.
May 31st, 2005 at 7:32 pm
See, I had no idea where the Albertan millionaires lived.
I refuse to look at mortgage calculators for the moment.
May 31st, 2005 at 8:43 pm
Sheepish, I think single-family homes means a house that is not a duplex (one on top of another, where one person owns the building and rents out the apartments, possibly living in one — triplex 4plex, etc) or a condo but could include row housing (squished up next to each other). (I explain these because a duplex in the US where I was was two places next to each other, I forget what places one on top of the other were called.)
Vancouver stats include condos, which (I guess) is why the numbers are higher in Victoria? And, yes, it includes the entire metro area, including places where you don’t want to live.
Dare I ask what a “Vancouver special” is?
Actually, I’m sort of curious what condo prices are for more or less equivalent places in Vancouver. (FWIW, I’m looking at places near downtown but not in downtown, from 800-1200 square feet, 2 bedrooms, nice balcony, not a basement. Usually with parking, and, as it turns out, always with hardwood floors except for bathrooms and, sometimes, kitchen. These tend to range from 180-280 asking price; I gather they sell from 80% to 100% of asking, where the 80% is near the extremes of the price range, and the 100% around 250. Below this you get really revolting stuff (or nice stuff, in icky neighbourhoods, or nice stuff, in nice but way the hell out neighbourhoods). No, I’ve not researched this obsessively, why?)
May 31st, 2005 at 8:51 pm
Oh, Zh, if you know Toronto prices, I’m also curious. I do know Ottawa prices.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:07 pm
I’m guessing that the Vancouver prices include the really seedy, safe-injection-clinic, highest-HIV-infection-rate-in-North-America areas. Which are probably cheaper.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:14 pm
A Vancouver Special is a small, cookie-cutter house, usually only one story, whose defining characteristic is a half-underground basement that is perfect for renting out as a basement suite. They abound here.
I haven’t done my research, so I’m slightly pulling these numbers out of my ass (aka poorly remembered anecdotal evidence), but I think a 2 bedroom condo like you describe in a trendy near-downtown area like Kitsilano or False Creek would fetch $325-$450, and probably a bit more in Downtown/West End. If you want to live within 30 minutes of downtown, you can get below the $300k mark. (Just did some quick checking on mls to back up those numbers.)
Ask me what I think about affording those numbers on an academic salary. Second thought, don’t.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:39 pm
I lived in two of those half-basements. The first was $725/month, the second was $800. Neither was anything to write home about.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:47 pm
Only the portion of the front page of a newspaper above the fold is visible when a possible buyer looks at a stack of newspapers. Anything below the fold might as well be on page 38 — it’s not visible. The fold is *significant.* It’s exactly the same in a blog — anyone considering reading the post can only see the portion above the fold. Not that you stay up nights trying to figure how to get people to read your posts, but whether you place it by planning or by chance the fold makes a big difference.
June 1st, 2005 at 7:41 am
There are certainly some good things about living here. Looks like prices really are 1.5 to 2x as high in Vancouver. So I suppose I can guess at them in TO. (Condos downtown and, to a lesser extent, in the old port, get to your range. The area I’m looking at today is 7 minutes by metro, maybe 40 minutes walking to my downtown office, the other area is much bigger and ranges from 10 minutes to an hour walk.)
Those Vancouver Specials are quite something. I hope at least they’re relatively cheap.
I’m sure these prices include everything considered to be in the city, but I’m not sure how they define that. (Is Laval considered? The South Shore?) Certainly skeevy neighbourhoods. I wonder where our free heroin clinic is.
Cougar, fine, I see the relevance, but I don’t like the word for a blog anyhow. So there.
June 1st, 2005 at 11:20 am
The neighborhood I live in in Toronto has fully detatched houses with yard starting at about 250,000. My neighborhood is predominantly working class and has the highest percentage of recent immigrants in all of Canada (I think but it might just be Ontario) but I’d love to buy a house here someday. It takes me an hour to walk to campus. It’s a forty-minute bike ride to work for my wife who works in the downtown core proper. We have friends looking in Riverdale (just east of downtown) and Greektown (also east of downtown but on the other side of the Don Valley from Riverdale) where a single-family home can go for between 500,000 and close to a million.
I have no idea about condos here because on average, the condos in Toronto will fall apart if you breathe on them.