Forget detached homes: in Vancouver, ordinary condos are selling for $1 million

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      In Vancouver, the biggest story of 2015 was that the benchmark price for a single-family detached home in Vancouver surpassed $1 million.

      It was an arbitrary milestone but an event that neatly encapsulated people’s amazement with the region’s runaway real-estate market. It even spawned its own hashtag: #DontHave1Million.

      Fastforward to the present and god do we miss those innocent times when $1 million was all it took to buy a house in this city.

      Forget detached homes. In 2016 Vancouver, condos are selling for $1 million.

      And not big ones or fancy new ones. Old, built-in-1982, single-bedroom condos are selling for $1 million. Or $995,983, to be exact, according to one Dexter Associates Realty listing for 1040 Pacific Street.

      That sounds like a lot. And it turns out, it is.

      According to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the June 2016 benchmark price for an apartment on Vancouver’s West Side was $696,000. On the East Side, it was $418,000.

      So who’s going to spend $1 million on this 35-year-old one-bedroom for which the real-estate agent didn’t even bother to post a photograph?

      The listing's description offers a hint.

      “ATTENTION ALL INVESTORS!” it begins, with all-caps included in the original. “BUILDERS! DEVELOPERS! Land Assembly Opportunity for this building, very likely to happen very soon, potential to rezone the site to CD-1 and FSR of 6-8 at the discretion of the city's director of planning. Potentials are endless and it's one of the very last parcels left with ocean view potentials still adjacent to the Burrard corridor.”

      As the smart folks at CityHallWatch have suggested, what’s likely going on here relates to a recent change to the Provincial Strata Property Act.

      Before November 2015, the government required 100 percent of an apartment complex’s strata members to vote to dissolve their strata organization and allow for a building's sale and/or a property’s redevelopment.

      After that date, and in accordance with the revised Provincial Strata Property Act, a developer only needs 80-percent of strata members on board before it can give everybody the boot and build a new tower where those people once lived.

      At 1040 Pacific, a developer may have convinced or may be trying to convince an 80-percent majority of the strata that a collective willingness to sell could fetch them a return that's just too good to pass up.

      The potential for redevelopment that the 2015 change to the Provincial Strata Property Act opened up means some one-bedroom condos built in the 1980s could be worth a lot more than some people realize.

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