A New Urban Living Site

I do hope you all had a wonderful thanksgiving, and now some of you may be in the thick of the Black Friday madness.

I have a new webspace setup with a blog about urban living opportunities in Vancouver USA. The last twenty years has seen a push locally to a more vertical downtown with mixed use and urban residential at the heart of it all. The new waterfront has been a bit of a culmination of this effort that began with the redevelopment of lower downtown and the Esther Short Park area.

The new site will focus primarily on urban condominiums in Uptown Village, Downtown, and the new Waterfront, as well as Columbia Shores and Shorewood.

Vancouver has a great urban vibe downtown with just enough vertical space to feel like a city but not so much to feel crowded. Sunlight still makes its way to the street and parking is still much better than larger cities like Portland. This is a real beautiful in between offering the best of both worlds between a major city and a mid-sized city.

Vancouver has evolved into a smallish large city and that is the porridge that is just right.

Please check out Urban Living in the 'Couv' here.

Are Condos Cool Again?

How about that condo life? Are they back in vogue or is the rental side taking over the scene? Well I did some digging into the data and Condos might just be cool again. We are selling about 40 units a month in Vancouver and that is about 10% of the local sales. The median price for Condos is trailing the overall median by about a hundred grand. But with most condos having association dues, that mean buyers are paying about the same monthly payment for the median condo as they are for the median home.

Here in America's Vancouver the luxury condos have started to come back. In each of the last 6 months at least one condo unit over $600,000 has closed and several seven figure units have gone as well. The most expensive unit was a darling at $3.1 million. That one was sold in September in the Tidewater Cove development. In fact two $3 million plus units at Tidewater have closed in that six month window. A few seven figure units have sold downtown as well including a 3000 footer on the 11th floor of Vancouver Center 3.

With the waterfront apartment buildings coming online right now and more on the way, and the under construction units in the new Kirkland Tower on the waterfront, a little action in the market bodes well. A fair bit of condo activity is happening in that critical $500k - $1M area that will help pave the way for more units on the new waterfront.

Overall I'd say condos are in fact cool again. Millennial buyers are definitely showing a high level of interest in both luxury apartments and condo units. It seems our young people are staying in the city more so than their predecessors in Gen X or Baby Boomers.