Vancouver's Real Estate Market

[underscore]

Originally Posted by westopher

There's very little motivation to excel when your wages can increase by 100% and only get you 10% more than the original wage would have at its time. Imagine putting in the work of going from a 50k to a 100k a year job and it buying you the same lifestyle as the 55k a year job would have for you back then.

That's more or less what I did, my current salary is ~120% of what it was when I bought my place in 2013, and if I was trying to enter the housing market now instead of when I did I wouldn't be able to buy this same house. Meanwhile the rent for my friends 600sqft 1 bed + 1 bath apartment is more than my mortgage. That's all fucked.

[lilaznviper]

Originally Posted by beatdownvictim

Just wondering if anyone has any referrals to a cctv/security cam residential install?

Home we are looking at only has a ring doorbell cam =\
I can go ghetto and just put up eufy cams but rather not unless it really is cost prohibitive.

Let me know if you still need a camera install guy. i have a go to contractor i use for all low voltage stuff and does a good job.

[JDMDreams]

Rs anti homeless investment club

Originally Posted by Alpine

Time for a revscene group buy. Each person throws in 50-500k and we can crowd find this easy.

[donk.]

Originally Posted by 68style

My buddy lives a couple buildings down from me in a really new tower... it was CRAZY what happened in his place, the entire council got hostile taken over last year by a penthouse owner using fake proxy voters, elected a council of basically all people from China who are friends of his who own units but don't even live in the building, they then proceeded to tear up all the budget proposals, refused any increases, can't pay their bills, can't cover insurance... it's a fucking disaster and not a thing they can do about it, the building is going to implode in on itself. They conducted all their council meetings for the entire year exclusively in Mandarin. He put his unit up for sale and can't get out of their fast enough. Businesses that did work for the building are putting liens against it and shit... insanity.

I know of another complex in Richmond where an owner has hired a strata lawyer to sue the council because they are syphoning money out of the building... it's getting pretty mental out there.

I've only seen YouTube videos on stuff like this going on, never heard it from a friend or anyone I know.

It must be a fractional amount of buildings that are run like this, I'm glad everyone I know has a "good" strata.

The last place I lived at, and I think you can find the comments xx pages back, one of the owners owned like 20-30 units out of the 60 total. He was trying to get majority votes by buying up more units so he could sell to a developer.
He also ran an airbnb business and racked up like 100-200k in strata fines that are still unpaid to this day, even with a court order.
At least the building was run very well otherwise.

Hopefully your friend gets out with minimum losses, that's almost the worst case scenario for buying a condo.

[Fafine]

Originally Posted by 68style

Most AGM's were last week, I wasn't able to attend mine but I expect to get a shitty email soon telling me how much my strata fees have gone up. It was a big jump last year and I expect the same this year.

My buddy lives a couple buildings down from me in a really new tower... it was CRAZY what happened in his place, the entire council got hostile taken over last year by a penthouse owner using fake proxy voters, elected a council of basically all people from China who are friends of his who own units but don't even live in the building, they then proceeded to tear up all the budget proposals, refused any increases, can't pay their bills, can't cover insurance... it's a fucking disaster and not a thing they can do about it, the building is going to implode in on itself. They conducted all their council meetings for the entire year exclusively in Mandarin. He put his unit up for sale and can't get out of their fast enough. Businesses that did work for the building are putting liens against it and shit... insanity.

I know of another complex in Richmond where an owner has hired a strata lawyer to sue the council because they are syphoning money out of the building... it's getting pretty mental out there.

What's the name of the building?

[HonestTea]

Originally Posted by 68style

Most AGM's were last week, I wasn't able to attend mine but I expect to get a shitty email soon telling me how much my strata fees have gone up. It was a big jump last year and I expect the same this year.

My buddy lives a couple buildings down from me in a really new tower... it was CRAZY what happened in his place, the entire council got hostile taken over last year by a penthouse owner using fake proxy voters, elected a council of basically all people from China who are friends of his who own units but don't even live in the building, they then proceeded to tear up all the budget proposals, refused any increases, can't pay their bills, can't cover insurance... it's a fucking disaster and not a thing they can do about it, the building is going to implode in on itself. They conducted all their council meetings for the entire year exclusively in Mandarin. He put his unit up for sale and can't get out of their fast enough. Businesses that did work for the building are putting liens against it and shit... insanity.
.

That's insane, which building is this? Can PM if you don't want to blast them lol

[westopher]

Is it the same one where the guy was the only one with access to the buildings gym? Lol if that's a different clusterfuck with the same situation.

[Hondaracer]

^ doubt it was that one. That one was one of those shorter ones along false creek in yaletown I think

[mikemhg]

Originally Posted by 68style

Most AGM's were last week, I wasn't able to attend mine but I expect to get a shitty email soon telling me how much my strata fees have gone up. It was a big jump last year and I expect the same this year.

My buddy lives a couple buildings down from me in a really new tower... it was CRAZY what happened in his place, the entire council got hostile taken over last year by a penthouse owner using fake proxy voters, elected a council of basically all people from China who are friends of his who own units but don't even live in the building, they then proceeded to tear up all the budget proposals, refused any increases, can't pay their bills, can't cover insurance... it's a fucking disaster and not a thing they can do about it, the building is going to implode in on itself. They conducted all their council meetings for the entire year exclusively in Mandarin. He put his unit up for sale and can't get out of their fast enough. Businesses that did work for the building are putting liens against it and shit... insanity.

I know of another complex in Richmond where an owner has hired a strata lawyer to sue the council because they are syphoning money out of the building... it's getting pretty mental out there.

How is this even legal?

It is truly an indictment of our government and legal system to have allowed these problems to fester without proper legal recourse, and some type of governing oversight.

[Phozy]

Originally Posted by Eff-1

There was some chatter a few pages back about strata fees. Watch out. I'm on our council and we're going the budgeting for next year and it's pretty wild what is happening right now.

Pretty much every trade and expense that we have to budget for has increased their rates any where from 5 - 10%, on top of last year's rate increases.

We have about 160 units. 3 individual low rise buildings. One elevator per building. One outdoor water feature. One gym. One party room. Our annual operating budget is about $1M. We charge about $0.45 psf.

Out of that $1M budget, we have to cover the following off the top of my head (all of which have increased rates, or about to increase rates):

- Building janitors/on site caretaker
- Carpet cleaning quarterly
- Snow removal
- Ongoing HVAC and building controls maintenance and repairs (this is a huge expense generally, it feels like every month there's some fan or some belt in some duct or something somewhere that needs replacing)
- Fire equipment testing and repairs (another huge expense, these systems are expensive, we just had our annual inspection and they found $10k in necessary repairs and we can't say no or defer because of the fire code requirements)
- Annual window washing
- Annual dryer vent cleaning
- Annual parkade cleaning
- Landscaping (we have a large parcel of land, so lots of landscaping, including ground floor townhome gardening)
- Elevator repairs (we have a locked in maintenance contract, but the hourly rates for repairs keep going up)
- Garbage removal (another one that keeps going up, and they always are blaming the increase in tipping fees from Metro Van)
- Insurance policy was $200k last year, so about 20% of our annual budget
- Hydro for common areas
- Gas for the stoves in units
- Hot water for the building
- Internet for the caretaker
- We pay for I think 12 different phone lines. 7 enterphones, 3 elevators, the fire system, and probably another one or two i'm forgetting.
- Security cameras/key fob system maintenance and repairs
- Ongoing electrical repairs and maintenance

I'm sure I'm forgetting something else. Pretty much all of that has gone up in price.

Keep in mind our building is less than 5 years old, so this is all just ongoing maintenance of a relatively new property.

Luckily we've had a good council to date of young professionals and a tax lawyer, so we stay on top of our books and our budget planning. Last year was our first ever strata fee increase of 7%. Up to then we've never had to increase fees since the building was completed in 2020 thanks to prudent budgeting and cost management.

My biggest worry is what if a council comprises a bunch of randos who don't understand finance at all, and because of that alone, strata fees are impacted (because nobody knows what they are doing). I could see that could be very big problem for some stratas since it's all volunteer driven and the people you end up with is the luck of the draw.

The nice thing about a house is you get to control your own expenses and decide what you want to defer, DIY, etc.

With a strata you don't get that flexibility generally speaking. That's ultimately why I volunteer to be on the council, so at least I have vision and can provide input into what's going on, and am not just paying a bill without having any control over it (like you would have with a house).

Good insight. Was looking at a condo's minutes; the building was completed in 2020. There was an $80k deficit in 2022, and they are voting to cover the costs via special levy, about $200 per unit.

They just had a 5% increase last fiscal - total operating budget of $2MM or a total $100k increase. I imagine they will have to increase another 5% this year. Building current charges 0.59 PSF.

[J____]

Originally Posted by 68style

Most AGM's were last week, I wasn't able to attend mine but I expect to get a shitty email soon telling me how much my strata fees have gone up. It was a big jump last year and I expect the same this year.

My buddy lives a couple buildings down from me in a really new tower... it was CRAZY what happened in his place, the entire council got hostile taken over last year by a penthouse owner using fake proxy voters, elected a council of basically all people from China who are friends of his who own units but don't even live in the building, they then proceeded to tear up all the budget proposals, refused any increases, can't pay their bills, can't cover insurance... it's a fucking disaster and not a thing they can do about it, the building is going to implode in on itself. They conducted all their council meetings for the entire year exclusively in Mandarin. He put his unit up for sale and can't get out of their fast enough. Businesses that did work for the building are putting liens against it and shit... insanity.

I know of another complex in Richmond where an owner has hired a strata lawyer to sue the council because they are syphoning money out of the building... it's getting pretty mental out there.

My building strata is pretty messed up too. strata fees are at 59cents/sqft, we have no pool, no concierge, not much amenities aside from a jacuzzi no one uses and a gym with 2 machines. Building condition has been going downhill in the past decade. The strata president has been in position for 15+ years, does not let anyone not in her circle into council. We have 327 units in our strata, only 20 people have shown up to agms in the past decade and miraculously president always had 100+ proxies to vote through her agendas. Our property manager holds the meetings (illegal), purposely does not provide translation services to non english speakers (about half are non english speakers) so those owners have given up on the agms. Our hired live in super never shows up to work or pick up the phone anymore and rude af to owners, and gets paid 80k a year with highly subsidized rent. He got sick of patrolling the commons area so he got the council president to lock it up for any owner to use. Last year management and council wanted to drain 2 million from the reserve to fix our roof based on an assessment from what looks like a friend of the property manager, as well as replace a perfectly fine fob system because they claimed parts may become unavailable in the future. Non much of the owners knew about it until I gathered literally half the units and told them what was going on. Suddenly 150 owners all attended the agm to vote against the agenda and council kept on finding excuses to delay the meeting until the owners got discourage enough to not attend. After 4 agm reschedules, the owners slowly stopped showing up and the council pushed through all the agendas with their fake proxies. Strata councils are corrupt as fuck if unlucky.

In your case a hostile takeover was done by shady owners from China. In my case the corrupt old timers have been milking the Chinese owners that don't bother to attend agms haha.

[Traum]

Gosh... hearing all these cray cray strata stories again is almost making me feel like all the ghetto DIY (house) maintenance I do at home worth it...

If anyone lives in a bat-shxt crazy strata property -- get yourself outta there pronto!

[68style]

Originally Posted by HonestTea

That's insane, which building is this? Can PM if you don't want to blast them lol

It's the Monet tower on Cook Rd...

Other one I am not sure of the name, one of those super old 4 stories near Richmond Centre

[Badhobz]

https://www.richmond-news.com/real-e...o-days-6840025



Looks like this prefab stuff is getting more popular

[JDMDreams]

Man that double roof thing is so ugly, what's with new builds and this style of roof, some put a balcony in the little roof triangle

[68style]

I kinda like it, looks very Swiss Alps/Austrian

[underscore]

A few years back a new company built a row of condos at Big White with really steep roofs that ended up having problems with too much snow building up in the deep V's. They had to fix them all and made them look like that picture, a second roof added on top of the original roof. Now when I see that style all I can think of is bad engineering. It looks like such an odd afterthought I can't imagine doing it on purpose let alone painting it a different colour to draw attention to it.

here they are: https://goo.gl/maps/au9SkzCcgCkkBAq17

[mc.]

How does that crazy strata stuff even happen? Fake proxy votes, owners must not even care or the building management company is shady as well.

There must be some sort of recourse for the owners against these shady councils and management, especially if the proxy votes are fake.

[Great68]

So this article came up about a stupid sign that a business in Sooke put up the other day:



https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/j...ersy-1.6349948

So, the sign is dumb, not disputing that. But I'm trying to wrap my head around the couple interviewed in the story. The dude looks like a typical straight male and his partner looks like a typical straight female (even referred to with he and her pronouns respectively in the story), but the woman identifies as queer? How does that work? Like I want to have an open mind here.
Not even mentioning they have two children who identify as transgender.

Edit: Whoops meant to post this in the No need to start new thread, thread. Feel free to move.

[carsncars]

Originally Posted by Great68

But I'm trying to wrap my head around the couple interviewed in the story. The dude looks like a typical straight male and his partner looks like a typical straight female (even referred to with he and her pronouns respectively in the story), but the woman identifies as queer? How does that work? Like I want to have an open mind here.
Not even mentioning they have two children who identify as transgender.

She could be bisexual, pansexual, or may not be strictly cis... "queer" is a pretty broad umbrella. I understand there are straight, cis-gendered people who identify as queer, although I think that's controversial with some of the LGBTQ community?

[westopher]

Yeah there's nothing saying she hasn't been with women before, or currently outside of their marriage. Most peoples sexual preferences would at least be a pamphlet, if not a book that you can't get from an interview like that.
That said, there's definitely straight, white, cis people out there that want to get in on the victim train for whatever is happening out there, whether their ancestry.com results come back with 1/16 indigenous or they kissed a dude on the lips at a New Year's party back in 2001 as a joke. I just don't bother to let it diminish the message if it's a reasonable one.

[Gerbs]

Originally Posted by JDMDreams

Is ground floor apartment with larger patio a desirable thing? Maybe it's a white people thing but Asians will be like, easy for a thief to come in. Then you gotta deal with cigarette butts, condoms being thrown on your balcony.

I've been only looking for units specifically with a larger patio but not ground level. I think it's super nice to have, you can host 10 - 25 people out there for a BBQ and have some resemblance of a house. Firepit too.

I set up a big umbrella to block out the cigarette butts, but honestly the most common items are bags + clothes + slippers from the wind. One time I got a brick that would've killed someone

[Gerbs]

Originally Posted by Eff-1

There was some chatter a few pages back about strata fees. Watch out. I'm on our council and we're going the budgeting for next year and it's pretty wild what is happening right now.

Pretty much every trade and expense that we have to budget for has increased their rates any where from 5 - 10%, on top of last year's rate increases.

We have about 160 units. 3 individual low rise buildings. One elevator per building. One outdoor water feature. One gym. One party room. Our annual operating budget is about $1M. We charge about $0.45 psf.

We're at $0.69/sqft for 18 years old, should send me your P&L statement, curious how our spendings differ. We budgeted a little over $1.1M operating I believe over 200 units. Gym. but nothing else. Out land is pretty big so landscaping owns us pretty hard and I don't see us getting the land sale value for another 30 years.

Originally Posted by J____

The strata president has been in position for 15+ years, does not let anyone not in her circle into council. .

It should be a vote, the president doesn't choose who's in the council

Originally Posted by mc.

How does that crazy strata stuff even happen? Fake proxy votes, owners must not even care or the building management company is shady as well.

There must be some sort of recourse for the owners against these shady councils and management, especially if the proxy votes are fake.

I don't think they're fake, that would be a pretty big litigation if you're putting in fake votes from units you don't own. I worked with a client who owned the entire corner of a 40ish floor highrise locally and he would get 4X votes. Probably similar situation.

[Eff-1]

Originally Posted by Phozy

Good insight. Was looking at a condo's minutes; the building was completed in 2020. There was an $80k deficit in 2022, and they are voting to cover the costs via special levy, about $200 per unit.

They just had a 5% increase last fiscal - total operating budget of $2MM or a total $100k increase. I imagine they will have to increase another 5% this year. Building current charges 0.59 PSF.

It's common for new buildings to have a large jump in fees in the first 1 or 2 years following completion because the developer's initial budget is often never enough to cover the actual operating costs once the building is fully occupied. We were lucky in that we survived the first couple of years without that, but only because we spent a LOT of time sharpening pencils when it came to budget management. It was basically a second job.

[Eff-1]

Originally Posted by Gerbs

We're at $0.69/sqft for 18 years old, should send me your P&L statement, curious how our spendings differ. We budgeted a little over $1.1M operating I believe over 200 units. Gym. but nothing else. Out land is pretty big so landscaping owns us pretty hard and I don't see us getting the land sale value for another 30 years.



It should be a vote, the president doesn't choose who's in the council



I don't think they're fake, that would be a pretty big litigation if you're putting in fake votes from units you don't own. I worked with a client who owned the entire corner of a 40ish floor highrise locally and he would get 4X votes. Probably similar situation.

One difference might be insurance? I would imagine the premium for an 18 year old building might be substantially different than a newer building. Our total premium last year was $200k with $50k deductibles.

I agree with you, the word "fake" needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It's very hard to run an AGM with votes from owners that aren't real owners. Owners could take the council to court, or complain to the regulatory body for property managers if that was actually the case. Easier said than done, but yes there is oversight to prevent that scenario.

But it's definitely true that one person can assemble a lot of proxies from apathetic owners and then push forward his/her agenda accordingly.

In our case, we have one owner who owns about 15 out of 160 units and rents them out. He could easily sway a vote one way or another if he wanted.