Perhaps no housing and real estate market in North America is as healthy or contains as much potential as the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For decades, the public at large viewed Vancouver as nothing more than a squalid mill town beseeched by rain 300 days of the year. But Expo ’86 changed all that forever. The city did an incredible job of cleaning up many industrial sites and the 10 solid days of nothing but beautiful sunshine demonstrated to the world that Vancouver was truly an unpolished diamond with incredible ocean and mountain views ready to be invested in.

Since 1986, real estate prices have been rising, and they haven’t really stopped. For those familiar with the Vancouver housing markets, it has become a bit of a running joke trying to figure out where the ceiling is for investment here. The short answer is that there might not be a ceiling at all, at least for another 5-10 years.

Vancouver was picked as the host for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and real estate investors are watching this date very closely. Much like the massive clean up and infrastructure improvements spawned the first major real estate boom in Vancouver in 1986, many experts believe that the exact same thing is going to happen with the 2010 games, but on a much larger scale. Combine this with poll after poll showing the quality of living in Vancouver is consistently in the top three in the world, and the fact that there are still real estate bargains to be had here when you compare it to other world class cities like San Francisco and New York, and you have one of the hottest real estate investment markets anywhere in the world.

And recent polls of current Vancouver residents bear this out. A March 2007 poll by Royal Bank of Canada shows that a higher percentage of BC residents, 11 percent compared to the nationwide average of 9 percent, consider themselves ‘very likely” to buy a home within the next year. Not only does this demonstrate that BC is definitely the best place in Canada to buy a home, but also that the 4 million plus population of Canada’s western-most province see the potential value in BC real estate, too.

For those that are scared off by the skyrocketing price of real estate in Vancouver (compared to Canadian standards), the same poll showed that an astonishing 93 percent of those polled consider owning a home in BC to be a good or very good investment. So while it may take the average BC resident a little extra while to afford the home of their dreams, they are dedicated to the idea of owning their own home; which is music to the ears of potential investors in the greater Vancouver area.

So, what about the two years until the Olympics come to town? No one wants to invest in a property only to see the value remain stagnant until some future event. A 2006 article in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix says that while the Vancouver housing boom is extraordinary by Canadian standards and while all booms do eventually end, that the most likely outcome of the current surge in the Vancouver housing market isn’t a bust or a collapse, but a slow leveling off of prices, also known as a “soft landing.” Which leads to the question: when? Many experts believed the housing market in BC would begin to slow in 2006, then it got put off to 2007. But one look at current downtown Vancouver and the construction that is taking place to get the city ready for the two week PR campaign known as the Olympics, and there is no sign anywhere that the housing market here is headed for decline.

The most optimistic perspectives on the Vancouver housing market is that the current surge will continue through the Olympics in 2010 and, thanks to the games, it will receive a renewed burst of energy that could carry it through 2015, or later. With this much potential, it is easy to see why Vancouver is the place to be for the next decade, plus.


Prosperously Yours,
Mary Wozny