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Hundreds of luxury Vancouver mansions being rented for cheap
- ddebernardy 8y agoRelated: "What can/do governments do to address house prices being driven up by foreign investors?" on the Politics StackExchange: https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/24073/15531 https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/24073/15531
- BadassFractal 8y ago> The city of Vancouver is facing a crisis in housing affordability, with one bedroom units averaging about $1,730 per month. I'll take that any day over SF. That's a crisis I can sign up for.
- leesalminen 8y agoThat’s Canadian dollars, too so $1289 USD. My rent was higher in Boulder 5 years ago.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- refurb 8y agoThat only helps if you live in vancouver and get paid in USD.
- clay_the_ripper 8y agoThat’s exactly what I thought. My immediate reaction was, if that’s a crisis, then what is San Francisco?? (Currently paying 3700 for a one bedroom in sf)
- jandrese 8y agoHas San Fransisco not been in a housing crisis for decades now?
- phil248 8y agoNo, it used to just be an expensive city. Over the last decade it has become the most expensive city. Rents have literally doubled.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kevintb 8y agoTech salaries are not even close to SF levels. The average pay for a software engineer in Vancouver is $70,000. Many new grad jobs average around $35,000/year.
- echlebek 8y agoI've seen people offered that little, but it's hard to believe anyone would take a company up on it. I started at a modest $50k, in 2010, in Vancouver, and was barely getting by at that salary. I can't imagine putting in 40 a week for $35k in 2019, that's highway robbery.
- parthdesai 8y agoYeah, and how much more are you making in SF. Average software dev salary in Vancouver is $65k CAD ($48k USD) vs $113k USD in SF.
- vancouverer 8y agoWhere do people get these numbers? I signed up an account just to comment on this buffoonery. I’m making almost $200K and haven’t been pitched a senior role under $130K in years... How can your data be soooo far off?
- mattnewport 8y agoBoth numbers seem low but the ratio seems plausible. I continue to hear about friends and acquaintances leaving Vancouver for the Bay Area or Seattle because the offers are double what they can get in Vancouver. People being offered $150K CAD base in Vancouver are being offered $250K USD base often with more generous stock based comp. Overall cost of living in Vancouver (including healthcare) is still quite a bit lower than the Bay Area but there's no doubt most engineers with some experience end up significantly better off financially taking offers in the US.
- vancouverer 8y agoI certainly made a lot more in California but it’s not that great a spread with costs considered relative to the dramatic improvement in quality of life living in Vancouver. $200K is a lot of money. I save most of it because I literally have nothing to spend it on. In turn I get access to facilities and lifestyle opportunities that were simply not available in the valley. 100K more still wouldn’t get me that in the valley. Edit: my tax rate is also very comparable. BC income tax at 200K is very similar to California. Also, I eat out a lot and sales tax is only 5% on restaurants. Good restaurants are also cheaper here. Vancouver is really not the engineering wasteland people seem to think it is.
- mattnewport 8y ago
- Mikeb85 8y agoYeah but salaries are far lower than SF.
- lainga 8y agoPrecisely. Many of my peers reacted to the news of Amazon coming to Vancouver with "yeah, but at Vancouver salaries".
- phil248 8y agoWho cares about a bigger salary if most of the difference gets directly deposited in your landlord's bank account?
- Judgmentality 8y ago> most of the difference Well this varies from person to person, but in my experience most senior tech employees in the Bay Area are making much more than they would elsewhere, enough to offset the difference and put a lot more in their bank account each year. I currently make several times what I was making in the last city I worked.
- derefr 8y agoHaving 1/3rd of $100k is more spending money than having 1/3rd of $50k. Prices for things that aren't rent, don't change by market. You can buy more smartphones, donate more money to charity, whatever you want.
- Mikeb85 8y agoBecause after paying local expenses, you're left with more money to buy things that aren't priced according to the local market. Same reason it's worthwhile living in a rich country versus a poor one. I pay far more in rent and for food than someone in, say, Ethiopia, but what remains allows me to purchase more things anyway.
- asteli 8y agoFor whom? The people threatened by a dysfunctional housing market aren't the the people pulling 100k+ wages as information workers. Vancouver's minimum wage is $13.85 CAD, so like 10USD? That's not 3x lower than what a service sector employee is making in SF.
- poutine 8y agoYou'll likely get paid $50-$100k USD per year as a developer in Vancouver.
- mirimir 8y agoSure, but the problem in SF is that the units don't exist, right?
- Tiktaalik 8y agoYeah this one area where SF and Vancouver aren't comparable. Vancouver like any city has its yimby tinges, but it has always built lots of housing. Multi-unit development at the moment is at all time highs.
- starky 8y agoWould you take that at half the salary as SF or even worse? Because salaries in Vancouver are super low compared to the major US tech hubs. Not to mention good luck finding anything decent quality with a 0.6% rental vacancy rate, competition is fierce.
- curiousjorge 8y agoexplains the propensity for crime
- jandrese 8y agoSeems like the housing tax is working as intended. The most interesting part is how this is one of the few serious sources of backpressure on rent. Normally landlords are so loathe to reduce rents that they'll let a property sit vacant for months, but this tax makes that extremely painful so they're forced to instead meet the market on rent prices.
- somethoughts 8y agoYes - this seems like it might be an interesting avenue to take for high cost of living cities with a lot of foreign owned condos like New York City.
- branchless 8y agoIt's called land value tax, it's been known for over 100 years. Many on HN think it's "socialism" as their flawed semi-liberal ideology has private property ownership without rent at its core.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago> Normally landlords are so loathe to reduce rents What's the reasoning here? I've tried to talk landlords down by less than a month's rent when taken over the course of a typical year lease, been told to shove off, only to watch the unit go unrented for months until they finally drop the price.
- jaggederest 8y agoThe cap ratio is based on base rent, rather than rent times occupancy. Especially if you have multiple properties, lowering the rent on any of them will negatively affect the rent on the others. This is especially true in commercial real estate, where your other tenants (e.g. in the same mall) sometimes have a "most favored nation" provision - if anyone else gets lower rent, they do too.
- refurb 8y agoLandlord’s are much more likely to kick money back, but keep the rent the same. I’ve even seen it in SF lately - sign a 12 month lease and your first month is free.
- grawprog 8y agoI wonder if it has to do.with the new speculator tax in BC for empty homes? Tax season's here. Seems like they're trying to avoid the fairly hefty new tax that would be levied on them for having an empty mansion.
- codingdave 8y agoThe end of the article confirms exactly that point.
- grawprog 8y agoYeah...it's pointless though. As soon as they're able to they'll raise the rent or kick them out. That's how shit works here.
- baybal2 8y agoI think so too, very very likely.
- baybal2 8y agoI once rented a $1.6m mansion apartment in Shenzhen for $500 a month. I guess, Chinese influence... For some locals, the math behind earning money from property in other ways than resale don't tell them anything. They got too used to the idea of flipping properties at six digit gain every few years. Naturally, the "measly income" from rent doesn't look much in comparison to that to simply bother thinking about.
- atomical 8y agoMaybe it's more important to them to find someone who isn't going to wreck the place and seems like a nice person? Could that be it?
- baybal2 8y agoIf it was the case, owners themselves would've taken more care to take care of their apartment. It was in quite bad shape for just a year old apartment.
- lainga 8y agoDo you mean "Chinese influence" like you got the apartment because of guanxi? Or like the situation in Vancouver now is influenced by what you saw in Shenzhen?
- baybal2 8y agoThe second one, and not only Shenzhen, but all of big cities in China. I often went into long discourses with recent immigrants about that. Their idea of how market work is long pass the level of sane, and rational. I keep telling them about "investing into a bubble is dumb thing to do" only to be greeted back by some bizarre "economic conspiracy theory." Most do that on advises of some "esteemed economic gurus" from China. That looks silly, but only until you you begin to think just how many thousands of multimillion buck properties were bought thanks to such "gurus"
- charlesdm 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lostmsu 8y ago> a single room in a multi-bedroom house for anywhere between $700 and $1,500 And that's called cheap? This article is a clickbait ad, IMHO.
- thinkingkong 8y agoIt is cheap compared to what you get for 1500 in a condo.
- msie 8y agoYes I suspect the article is being loose with the facts.
- nullterminator 8y agoFor Vancouver? Yes, that's cheap. You may only get one bedroom, but you also have shared access to the rest of the luxury mansion. It's not $1500 for one room.
- shitgoose 8y agohave you seen the rest of the house?:)
- refurb 8y agoI’m sure the fact the Vancouver housing market is rolling over helps in addition to the occupancy tax. Vancouver sfh prices are down 20% from peak and even more at the top end homes. In the past you could take the hit from leaving it empty when you were seeing $100-200k appreciation per year. Not any more!
- StreamBright 8y agoTitle should be anti-speculator legistlation has intended side effects.
- msie 8y agoI have a question though. The pictures with the article list the rentals as $1000/room not $1000 for the entire house and the article says that many owners do not want to rent to groups. So this is useless to the single renter. I don't know how the housing activist got his 800 results.
- mattnewport 8y agoI believe what they're saying is that they don't want to rent to you and a bunch of your friends as a group but as an individual you can rent a room and you will be sharing the house with other individuals to whom they rent individual rooms. I'd guess this is because they don't want a big group of students renting the place together and turning it into a frat house.
- crushcrashcrush 8y agoWe need to tax foreign-owned, non-owner-occupied properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some sort of scale: Foreign Owned, Non-Owner Occupied - 10% Per Year of Assessed Value Foreign Owned, Non-Occupied - 25% Per Year Foreign Owned, Owner Occupied - 0% Per year
- sintaxi 8y agoOr we can just start companies in places other than the Bay Area.
- koolba 8y agoOr how about levying State income tax on them?
- crushcrashcrush 8y agoThat would be a great start as well.
- paxys 8y agoOr, you know, start taxing all properties based on fair market value.
- ericd 8y agoTrue, phasing out prop 13 would help a lot.
- crushcrashcrush 8y agoAgreed! Prop 13 needs to die.
- ericd 8y agoYour percentages are a bit extreme, but in general, I think this policy would do a world of good toward moving housing back from an investment vehicle to primarily being treated as functional places to live. I think the percentages should apply to domestic non-occupied as well.
- WestCoastJustin 8y agoI have been following https://twitter.com/mortimer_1 https://twitter.com/mortimer_1 for a bit. He paints a pretty crazy picture with data of what is happening in the Vancouver housing market. People asking millions over assessed value, people selling at massive losses, and mansions renting for pretty cheap. An example: Bought 2013 $2,275,000 now asking $6,888,000, Bought 2016 $5,200,000 now asking $4,888,888, Bought 2016 $3,590,000 and sold for $3,250,000, etc.
- Deimorz 8y agoIt's extremely common for "too good to be true" listings like this on Craigslist to be scams, where if you inquire they'll try to get you to wire money for the rental. The person behind the listing doesn't have any connection to the property, they take the photos/info from legitimate listings on other sites (often real estate listings, not rentals at all). I'm sure it's possible that some of these listings are legitimate, but finding a bunch of listings on Craigslist isn't proof of anything and I think it's strange to base a story on it.
- giarc 8y agoThey have an interview with a person that actually moved into a unit, so that helps. Scams can easily be thwarted by asking to see the place in person.
- gwbas1c 8y agoDid you even read the article? This is because vacant properties in Vancouver are subject to an extremely high tax. The property owners are desperate to rent them out in order to avoid paying a very large tax.
- forkLding 8y agoAnyone have a list of these mansions that are being rented, google searching isn't showing anything? Sounds like a place to go for the summer now.
- paddy_m 8y agoThis sounds close to a land value tax. If you look around most US cities you will see a lot of land not being used for housing as compared to European cities. Land used for parking, lawns, roads, and vertical space not filled with bedrooms all contribute to higher rents. True, there are zoning laws that restrict these housing uses, but there is also no encouragement from the tax code. Land value taxes encourage more efficient use of valuable space.
- aufumy 8y agoThere was a ton of anti-Chinese bashing because they were seen as being the cause of empty homes, and this issue was linked to the housing crisis in Vancouver. But looking at the examples of empty homes, I doubt that the South Surrey place for example was owned by a Chinese owner. It would be interesting to see statistics. Also, a few hundred or even thousand homes rented to non-groups is hardly going to ease the tight vacancy rate in Vancouver. The housing issue has more to do to poor urban planning.