Vancouver! Are you kidding me!? As a local first-time home buyer, you’ll all but have to take up yoga. Deep breaths and calming thoughts? Gather them round and hug them tight. Here’s the awful fact: to buy anywhere decent in this city, you need $300k. Believe it.
But I’m a first-time buyer! How can I possibly?
Exactly our point. It’s a vicious, beautiful trap. If you don’t understand why Paolo and I, and 578,039 other lovely people, choose to live in Vancouver – the 89th most expensive city on earth – then you’ve obviously never visited.
- Read: Vancouver city guide
- Recollect: Vancouver’s Olympic Village
It’s not a bad commute. In the summer sun and the winter rain, – even in the summer rain – we Vancouverites fiercely love this place. London, New York, Hong Kong? No thanks. We love it here and we’re never leaving - not even to the suburbs. (Never the suburbs). But. To live here properly, enjoying all it has to offer, we need a small fortune.
Are Vancouver first-time home buyers total suckers?
A sample of recent MLS listings:
- 730 square feet, 1 bed, 1 bath, older building, shitty views ($320,000)
- Nondescript, newer condo, 2 bed, 2 bath, near Cambie* ($430,000)
- “Point Grey** starter home”, 2 beds, 1 bath, zero curb appeal ($990,000)
- The best view on earth, hockey players for neighbours, 4 beds, 4 baths ($12,500,000)
(Oh, Americans, before you reach for the calculator – our currencies are basically at par). Are you as depressed as me? Yup. How many first-time home buyers do you know shopping in the million-dollar range? Welcome to Vancouver!
Believe it. $300,000, bare minimum, starter price, shitty one-bedroom.
In this city, getting on the property ladder hurts. It draws blood.
Friends elsewhere are settling into their 3-bedroom homes plus office. They’re fencing the backyard for their new yellow lab. They climb stairs to go to bed.
Before we’ve even begun our first-timers’ house hunt – we know all these things are far-off dreams. Vancouver’s that expensive. Our ugly baby will almost certainly be a 1-bedroom apartment, maybe with a den? Here we go – throwing our lot into a very costly game. Get me to the beach before I change my mind.
Local lingo decoded: *Cambie = Big, main road with SkyTrain access to downtown. ** Point Grey = The only criminals here are racoons.
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Full photo credit to JamesZ_Flickr and sillygwailo [via Flickr Creative Commons].
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