Could Midtown Vancouver be the Next Hot Location?

I recently listed a small cottage with a colleage from the office in Midtown Vancouver. Midtown Vancouver? you ask, well yes, this is not an official neighborhood but is actually a part of three neighborhoods, Esther Short, Arnada, and Hough. Like Uptown and Downtown it is a description of a specific part of the neighborhoods. In this case the strip of blocks touching the SR-501 corridor or Mill Plain and 15th street between Uptown and Downtown. Anyway the cottage is a typical house in the area, but the area is quickly moving towards high density development. This could transform this to a real estate hot spot. Arnada and Hough are already pretty hot, but the midtown strip could go to the moon.

There is currently and has been for about 5 years now significant development in the area. Two sizable urban apartment projects went in a few years back with hundreds of units, 13 West on West 13th and Columbia and the large 15 west project on West 15th Street. Just north of 15 West, Ginn is building a infill urban apartment building. At C Street and Mill Plain the entire block is now Al Angelo's mid rise mixed use building. New Seasons market is going in at 15th and Main and that should create a buzz in the area as a market is the only thing missing in the greater
Downtown area. The block just west of the New Seasons was purchased recently by an investor group intending to erect a mid-rise building that will cover the entire block. Some high end units in two mid-rise towers recently came to market, Our Heroes Place at Mill Plain and D Street. This corridor is seeing some serious action and that new market might just bring some condos or other high density residential to the area.

There is currently hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects in the downtown area and more than a billion in proposed projects waiting in the wings. But the waterfront and lower Downtown areas are fairly expensive and the Mid-town area has a chance to provide some solid affordable urban high density housing with good access to amenities and the freeway for commuters. I'd keep an eye on this area it could be the next new thing.

State to Fully Open: Good for Inventory?

Part of me feels like the ultra tight inventory is at least partly due to a 'fear' of COVID and the decision by Governor Inslee to reopen the state this month may lead to some relaxation of anxiety that some sellers may have about strangers walking through their house during the listing period. But further exasperating the problem is a serious lack of building materials that is slowing the new construction slowdown and creating rising prices for new homes. This puts additional pressure on resale homes. Any seller thinking about making a move, right now the stars are aligned for sellers to dictate their terms.

Many sellers are concerned about "where will I go?" With inventory tight sellers can make rent back arrangements or other arrangements to soften the pressure about finding the replacement home. Once the building materials crisis ends, new homes will once again compete with resale and the window may close a bit on sellers.

So far this spring listings have been slow to materialize but they are picking up and I hope the reopening will bring out the remaining sellers that might be waiting for the pandemic to wane. 

Interest rates remain competitive and buyers can still get a fair bit of house for the money available to a median income family in Clark County. 

Vancouver Neighborhoods All Over the Board

Neighborhoods do matter. People will pay a premium to live in a neighborhood that offers something extra over another. Better schools, closer to services and shopping, views, access to highways or closer to major employment centers, and so on. Vancouver is a large enough city that it has a full range of neighborhoods across every urban and suburban subset. Just out side of town Vancouver even has some semi-rural neighborhoods with homes on small acreage.

But neighborhoods are hard to measure without a local real estate pro. Simply looking at a map or stat sheet with median prices will not tell the tale. Sometimes a better neighborhood has a lower median price. For example a neighborhood like Fairway Village in Vancouver has a lower median price than Felida. But pound for pound or foot for foot, Fairway Village is spendier. You see, Fairway village is a subset of Cascade Park East and it is entirely comprised of homes aimed at retirees and most are two bed units. These are smaller homes and thus tend to be a bit less expensive than the much larger homes typically found in Felida. 

Often times the median price of a neighborhood is driven by the fact that the area is confirming with lots of similar houses either big ones or smaller ones and thus one is lower than the other. Other times one neighborhood may have very similar styles of homes yet be priced very different, here is where the classic "location" issue arises. One mind find that lower priced areas are not always undesirable. The Esther Short neighborhood is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city, yet the median price in that neighborhood is well below the citywide median at only $350k. What gives? Esther Short is downtown and the waterfront. The bulk of the homes in the area are mid-rise and high-rise condos or apartments with an average size of less than 1000 square feet. So the median price per square foot is really high at more than $350 per foot. Contrast that with the expensive Riverview area the most expensive area at a median price over $1,000,000 but an average home is around 3000 sf. That neighborhood averages about 300 per foot. I wrote about price per foot and how it is rarely a good indicator of real value, but it shows that median pricing alone is only part of the neighborhood equation. 

Below is a map of Vancouver with pricing as of last month for broad neighborhood areas in and around the city. The overall median price for Vancouver was $423,000 at that point.