You heard it on Friday File first-the “story of how Vancouver lost its affordability-and its mind.”
Produced by Visual Capitalist which normally is focused on investments, Real Estate Mania presents in eight graphic panels the social, demographic and political history of how Vancouver developed from a boom town in 1887 to a sophisticated city.
The firm states their infographic’s purpose “is to connect the dots between Vancouver’s history of speculation, demographic waves, public policy, and external pressures that have all had a hand in shaping today’s hot real estate market in the city“.
The graphic panels do include the real estate crash in the early 1900’s as well as the impact of Expo 86.
The graphics describe major events shaping and moving Vancouver real estate to higher values include the handing over of Hong Kong to China in the 1990’s, and the Canadian government’s controversial Immigrant Investor Program. Rising assessment values are shown on aerial photos of the city, and there are lots of graphs and statistics to fuel a discussion over a coffee or two. Are we in a bubble? And if we are, when will it burst?
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Vancouver’s high price-to-rent ratio compared to Seattle is not evidence that Vancouver rents are especially high, but rather the opposite, despite what is said in the study. If you have a “high” price-to-rent ratio, that means that rents are low compared to the price of buying or, otherwise put, that the price of a home is way out of whack compared to the stream of rental payments that it would displace. Such a metric doesn’t really say much at all about whether rents are high or low in any absolute sense or relative to incomes. But it does speak to the “fundamentals” of the housing market and whether the high prices are driven by supply / demand constraints alone or whether they are driven by speculation of still further capital gains in the future.