I'd say waiting for / betting your chances of a Massey Tunnel replacement is no different than rolling the dice. The project can start rolling as soon as the provincial gov wishes it, or it could keep spinning its wheels and/or stall for an unknown number of years. I would not use the replacement bridge / tunnel as any sort of potential positive reasons to buy a place there.

On the other hand, I would definitely use the congestion -- whether it is coming from Massey Tunnel or Queensborough / Hwy 91 as a negative in considering a purchase there. It is something you'd have to deal with for an X number of years while you're there.

Become a male escort? :pokerface:

I looked at houses at sunshine hills before I bought in southwest Coquitlam. I absolutely love the neighbourhood but I just couldn’t get over the potential bridge/tunnel issues... same thing as richmond, queensborough, West van or north van.
It’s a roll of the dice. If the bridge happens, then your golden.

Remember that even if the government green lit a tunnel replacement tomorrow, it would likely take 3 to 5 years prior to project completion. There would be a lot of construction hell during that time. That is if you need to get into Richmond / Vancouver.

Tsawwassen isn't that cheap though. Ladner is relatively more affordable, but not as nice. However the City of Delta is making a big push to improve downtown Ladner through redevelopment and revitalization.

Studios mid $300ks and 1BR in the $425k ish. What I like is only 8 units a floor, boutique building, and quality developer. Beats lots of the me-too cluster buildings around area like Lumina from subpar quality builders.

On your BOSA Commercial vs Sovereign residential guys - it's not common place for these groundrules to not be set out by the time the building is completed. Fact that residential strata owed the fee for so long, someone has to pick up the tab. To do it years after with legal fees + accrue interest is a plain waste of money for the residential strata. I have a client with a 2BR will ask her next time, this will likely eat a hole in the Sovereign's contingency funds or even cause a special assessment.

Didn't the building have a massive leak from penthouse all the way down to the lobby.

What contingency fund :concentrate:

Anyone with experience buying at or near any ski hills?

Growing up my grandparents had built a "cabin" at Big White back in the 70's I think. Not much but enough room for my cousins and me and it was ski in, ski out. It was some of the best family trips we had. Now with my own kid I am looking for something similar but I am floored at the costs.

I didn't even bother looking at Whistler but even Sun Peaks, Mt. Washington and Silver Star surprised me at the strata / property tax costs. Saw quite a few units that looked like a good value in the $250k - $350k range but then have to add up to $1200/month in fees. Is that common?

So my questions are, is there a lesser know mountain or even mountain town I should be looking at? Not as worried about extreme terrain as I am old and slow, but do want decent snow conditions. Is Revelstoke too far for weekends? I would love a town like Jasper or Fernie but not the commutes.

When I priced out places at Big White with my wife a few years back if you managed to have it rented out full time you *might* break even. The fees can be insane and they're year round even though your rental season is ~4 months.

In the end we decided we're far better off to just rent places when we want to stay at the hill. Then you're not tied to 1 mountain and for the same money we could rent places that were nicer than what we would own. If you're just looking at it for personal use and not to rent you need to be up there a lot to make it worthwhile. Just the $14k/yr in fees gets you a loooot of nice rentals.

If nothing else I'd suggest renting a couple places at various hills you're considering before you buy anything. Terrain, conditions and accessibility can vary wildly from place to place. When I went to Revelstoke over a decade ago it wasn't really a family/beginner friendly hill. Fernie was fun to try once but with the layout of the mountain I'd never go there again. Silver Star has a cute village and it's a breeze to zip into town if you need anything. Big White has a lot of central condos but a lot of stuff that's *technically* ski in ski out, imo, isn't because it just dumps you to a gondola that hauls you back to the village so actually getting back to skiing takes forever.

Yeah my parents found the same with a studio condo in Whistler right next to the Marketplace area that they just sold.

Even pre covid the rental income did not generate much for them after all the fees and such. Unless you are willing to spend a bunch of your own time managing the unit, there isn't a lot to be gained, more flexible just to rent.

Okay, I was trying to figure out how to justify the spending vs use we would get and it didn't even come close.

There are lots of great choices for rentals all year except for xmas / new years which I don't want to be stuck in lift lines during my holidays anyways.

Still surprised at how much of a change it is from what the older generations could afford vs us with much higher incomes and yet can't even get close too.

Planning to purchase a home. Getting conflicting information for if I should get a realtor or not. Any insight would be appreciated.

On buy-side, you don't pay any commission. However, most of my friends usually go with a friend who kicks back 25 to 50% of the commission to help with LTT/GST.

Alternatively, you can just negotiate that with no representation with the seller.

@JDMStyo

My friends who are realtors seem to consistently kickback 25 to 50% on their buy-side purchases. Do you think that's necessary to stay competitive in the Greater Vancouver market? Or it's just something they do when they're starting out and will reject this kickback in their later years.

They closed 30+ properties this year and that would cut their earnings in half.

Pretty general question and I am sure it varies significantly based on individual's financial situation, but for those who are upgrading to detached home in the low $1-mil range, what is the typical or recommended down payment/mortgaged amount?

For instance 20% is kind of the rule of thumb for first home (mainly coz of the mortgage insurance), but is that applicable when you are spending > $1m?

Or are people typically putting a higher % down and mortgaging less when they upgrade?

For me, I will be taking what equity I get from selling my apartment and putting it as the down payment for the new place, which will be roughly in the 50% amount. There is no way I can service a huge mortgage if I only put something like 20% down but that might be different based on personal income and wealth levels.

For me, the ratio between down payment vs mortgaged amount has always been entirely dictated by the bank in terms of how much they were willing to lend me. This happened with my starter apartments, to bigger apartments, to detached homes. I didn't really have much of a say lol~

IMO, if you have the means to determine the size of your mortgage, then it'd really just goes back to how much you want to borrow, versus what else you can do with that money. Esp if you're a good investor, since interest rates are so low right now, I'd say it makes the most sense right now to borrow as much as you are capable of servicing from the mortgage, and use (ie. invest) the available funds for something else.

You don't have a say, it's how much you can afford or get laughed at by trying to buy a million dollar home with $50k down. And obviously not enough income to borrow $950k what about closing costs and property transfer tax.

And yes it does make sense to borrow as much as you can now to keep your cash reserves for investment. Since investment return is higher than borrowing rates right now

Thanks for the initial input. I can definitely put down a decent portion of the down payment, I guess the question is whether to put down more than what the bank qualifies us for, or to keep it at the bare minimum and borrow the most that they give us within our budget.

Maybe that is the best approach, set a budget of what we want to buy first, see how much the bank will lend us (hope that it is more than our original budget), and then put the minimum amount down to meet the original budget instead of going HAM on what the bank will lend us.

Well why not borrow the max based on your down payment and cash on hand, and then the balance of the loan in a HELOC? Then you have that money available but don’t have to use it

For properties above $1M, you have to put down at least 20%.

When we made the upgrade last fall, our decision came down to cash flow as we could have probably put down much less than we did, particularly if wanted to do a rental suite in the house.

It makes a lot of sense to do a revolving mortgage/HELOC when you're buying something over $1M these days.

^^ if you can get it approved, it's more difficult to get approved for Heloc cuz it's revolving

Case in point

#1605-4815 Eldorado Mews
1br 1ba 549sqft

Sold for $540k in Dec 2017
Sold for $532k in Jan 2021

Seen some detached take a hit lately in the 6 digit range.

Maybe $GME is a better investment nowadays :troll:

^ I've been looking at detached in the $2m range and all the ones I'm interested in seeing either has offers or received offers even before the first open house

Looked at a house in North Vancouver today. 1.3 million and the seller had 70 parties to show this past weekend. I am not even going to bother to try an offer. This range of the market is too ridiculous.