Why to Buy Your Home Now; Vancouver Island, Winter, 2024
Summary
We expect to see multiple & competing offers, with NO Financing Conditions for all home types, priced from $400k to $1.1M, starting now, and growing to “full-scale crazy- town” by May.
Use this time before May 2024 to take advantage of slight & short term softening of the market before:
- News of lower mortgage interest rates ignites a powder keg of sidelined, eager, competitive buyers.
- Prices continue to climb due to continued competition from 4 million New Canadian immigrants for the few homes on the market; for the next 4 years!
- Housing will remain in super-tight supply with inventory pre-sold before it gets to market.
Shameless Advertisement … then the data
Your #1 concern should be: how does my offer win among 5, 10 or 20 others?
Will you have the confidence in your broker or bank to write a No Condition or Lo Condition Offer?
We support NO CONDITION & LOW CONDITION OFFERS!
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- with 100% pre-underwritten approvals and
- 9am to 11 pm live phone support – with me & your realtor – when writing your offer to ensure it works.
To take your 1st step to a FULLY Pre-Undewritten, Pre-Approval; that could go NO Conditions, if needed – click here.
DETAILS
1. Mortgage Rates
Have Decreased Already – but on the down low.
Without media attention, About 20 tiny reductions have already happened for FIXED RATES.
- Fixed rates have been slowly and quietly decreasing from Post-COVID 20 year highs; they were ~7% and are now ~5%
- Most people are only aware of the 10x Prime rate increases in a row post-COVID in 2023/23
- Prime has held steady at 7.2% since then,
- 1st Prime reduction expected in July and it has already been “100% priced-in” by the stock market.
- Inflation and the Consumer Price Index came in at 2.9% and is now back inside the target range of 1.0% to 3.0%.
Why the Rush?
1A. Joe Public is now correctly thinking;
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the slight extra interest cost of buying now with marginally higher mortgage rates and some actual inventory selection to choose from; far, far, far out weighs …
- the small increase in buying power from lower rates that is sure to come with
- massive price increases when buying in the frenzy starts after the BoC rate cuts hit the news.
1B. 50% of “Exhausted Buyers” plan to re-enter the market when rates drop
A recent survey, half (51%) of those who put their home purchase plans on hold, now say they will re-enter the market when they hear that rates have dropped.
- A rate decline of just o.25% would be enough to bring 10% of those Exhausted Buyers back,
- A rate decline of 1.00% would bring back 23% of those sidelined.
- the Prime rate (for variable rates) is expected to go down 2%, and fixed rates could easily sneak down another 1.5% yet too.)
1C. AUTO_RATE_FLOAT_DOWN helps
In a decreasing rate environment, if the rates goes down AFTER you sign, you still AUTOMATICALLY get the lower rate right up until 5 business days before you move in.
See the GRITTY details of WHY THE VARIABLE RATE IS THE WAY TO GO HERE
- The Variable lets you take advantage the rates going down over the next 28 months, right now. It goes you an option to not take a fixed rate at near 10-year highs.
2. Home Pricing
Home prices on Vancouver Island are FULLY SUPPORTED, and will NOT be dropping at all, due to continuous demand from record setting immigration for the next 5 years.
- Remember in 2022, during COVID when “buyers were acting irrationally” and then home prices went up $500k over 1 year?
- That is about to happen again!
Consider this is the reason why Vancouver Island is in such demand …
- Every day, somewhere in Canada, say about 100 people retire and “sell all their things” and plan to move West, to the Island, and retire in Canada’s only temperate rain-forest. The #1 location choice for retirees.
- Right now the high interest rates are slowing the asset sales for these retirees to “move their high value assets” and move West including: primary and rental homes, cabins, businesses, vehicles and boats.
- When interest rates come down, buyers will better afford loans on these assets, and the above items will sell. The “tidal wave” of backlog retirees will all “move West to the Island” for the weather and retirement in a rush.
- With plentiful CASH reserves to haphazardly throw down on their last home purchase, completing their dream; and frustrating yours.
Prices are expected to further INCREASE for the next 5 years due to these data points below:
3. Current homes prices well below national average:
For 2023: Calgary; up 4%, Halifax; up 3%, Victoria; up 1%
- All other cities in Canada are down 18% to 21%‘; which really means Victoria is really up about 22-ish%.
- [data point here]
4. Peek New-to-Canada Immigration
Overall Canada’s population growth is 3.1% – 6x higher than the USA at o.5%.
- 1.2 million new Canadians arrived in 2022 – highest growth of all the G20.
- 4 million new Canadians are on the way before 2027; where will they live?
- That’s 2x Canada’s already hefty overall population increase, which also broke records.
- “We have never seen the young adult population growing anywhere nearly this fast before,” an analyst wrote. “Putting additional pressure on rents now, and in the medium term, it will put pressure on home prices.”
- See the red-blue graph below
5. Renting in the Wild West
37% of Canadian households are renters.
- New renters are on the scene from an unprecedented rise in working age population – up 874,000 in 2023
- Rent inflation was 8.2% in October 2023 – highest in over 40 years.
- The difference between rent inflation and “standard inflation” is the highest in 60+ years.
Costs to build a home are up 51% since 2020.
- High costs for all inputs, scarcity of skilled construction workers, higher mortgage interest rates for builder’s financing, supply-chain bottlenecks from COVID. (See the graphics below.)
- Forest fires from 2020 to 2023 have reduced the supply of lumber.
- 100,000 new construction workers are needed in Canada.
- Most will be “temporary foreign workers” also hoping to become citizens and buy the same home supply they are producing.
- Construction wages were up 11.5% in 2023.
{Lots of fantastic graphs go here.
For a copy of the actual report in PDF, please request from me in email.}
What about COMPETING / Multiple Offers?
- We do Lo/No CONDITION OFFERS with Pre-underwritten, Pre-approvals that actually work.
- And I answer my phone from 9-9 x 360 so you can win your competing deals at the last second.
- Banks don’t offer this service. We have been doing this since “the Rush of 2007” when home prices were going up $1000/ day. This will be similar.