I'm much more familiar with Vancouver 15 years ago than I am with Vancouver now, but at the time the market was being inflated by the externalities of Hong Kong's reabsorption. I would suspect that Vancouver has a lot of the same Chinese mad money that San Fran and Los Angeles have, where you've got Chinese rich shipping money off shore into investments that are protected from the vagueries of a command economy. But I don't think it'll deflate as quickly as it inflated. Vancouver has the same geographical issues as San Francisco - it's on a spit, bounded by water, with limited access points. There will always be heightened demand for locations in close. You'll lose the drive for multi-family, by the way. San Francisco lost. Seattle lost. And both of these are so much worse than Vancouver. You drive into Vancouver from the south and it's a gleaming bauble of tinted curtainwall. You drive into San Francisco and it's still row houses. And it could be argued that the high salaries of internet startups that don't actually produce value are contributing to the problem. If Hootsuite had to pay its employees what it can earn from its services, rather than what it can gain from ridiculous overvalued IPOs, outfits like Hootsuite might not be driving $2000/mo 1br condos in the downtown core.
I wish we had we had the high salaries of places like NY and SF to go along with the high cost real estate. Even Hootsuite's salaries are half of what you could earn in SF AND in Canadian dollars instead of USD.And it could be argued that the high salaries of internet startups that don't actually produce value are contributing to the problem. If Hootsuite had to pay its employees what it can earn from its services, rather than what it can gain from ridiculous overvalued IPOs, outfits like Hootsuite might not be driving $2000/mo 1br condos in the downtown core.
Yeah, we had many conversations at the company I interned at last year about what their goal was. We're convinced that they have some sort of secret project they're working on, because no one we talked to at Hootsuite could tell us why they were hiring so many people.
The Chinese money suspicion is an absolute fact. As an anecdote, my cousin-in-law's off-shore family has bought at least a dozen multi-million dollar homes that I know of that they may have visited once. At least they pay for the up-keep though as many do not. The same day you posted about the Venice house I read this article about a Chinese couple that bought 2 houses for $10 million in 2010, have never even visited and they are just sitting rotting. Apparently about 15% of condos are sitting empty as well. And then there is the seperate issue of people buying newly renovated properties for $6 mill and demolishing them. That is my Uncle's old house and is beautiful as is.
Kind of baffling, isn't it? Makes you wonder just how much money they have to throw away. Whether they get to write off the depreciation on a home for letting it crumble into the dirt. Friend of mine lives up by the Hollywood sign. His is the white one on the right. In 2012 Ashton Kutcher moved in and knocked over whatever was there and build a pleasure palace. In 2014 he moved out. In 2015, the new owner tore it down and built something bigger. Think he was a producer on Hurt Locker.