Hire a professional Renovator

Sun

Home renovation is both a financial and emotional investment. The members of the Renovation Council of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association (GVHBA) say a professional renovator will help you to get the most value for your investment and provide peace of mind.

A successful home renovation begins with good planning. It is important to get a renovation contractor involved in the early stages of your project when you first begin to develop your plans. Renovators will discuss your ideas with you in detail and offer technical advice, design concepts and product suggestions.

In choosing a renovator, ask friends, family, co-workers and neighbours for recommendations if they have had professional renovation work done recently. Look around your neighborhood for renovation projects underway. Talk to the homeowners about the work and the contractor. Most people enjoy discussing their renovation experiences.

Visit home shows. The GVHBA sponsors two Vancouver-area home shows. This gives you a perfect opportunity to get first impressions and useful advice. Talk with the renovators at the association exhibit, check out their displays, which usually highlight previous projects and pick up company literature and business cards.

Ask suppliers and retailers of building materials, products and hardware. Reputable renovators have a network of suppliers with whom they conduct business with regularly, ranging from lumberyards to kitchen cabinet manufacturers. Visit established suppliers in your community and ask for the names of renovators suitable for your project.

Check local advertising. Professional renovators often specialize in certain geographical locations. Look in your community newspaper for ads placed by established firms.

Good management is essential to achieve your renovation goals. Established renovators will co-ordinate your entire project from start to the pop of champagne at the finish. Based on the requirements for your project, they will organize the right team from their network of experienced staff, subtrades and suppliers.

Communication is the cornerstone of a good working relationship. Experienced renovators listen carefully, and deal with your concerns and questions promptly and to your satisfaction. During the work itself, they stay in close contact with you and discuss the progress of the work regularly.

Peace of mind comes from knowing that you are getting what you are paying for. Professional renovators put it in writing. They give you a list of references for previous projects. They work with a contract that details the work, the materials and the cost of your renovation. They show proof of liability insurance and workers’ compensation. Once the job is completed, the renovator will still be there, with a commitment to after-sales service.

When you add it all up, the choice is clear. When you want to hire someone to renovate your home, make sure it’s a professional renovator. It’s your best assurance that you will get the quality and value that you can enjoy for years to come.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Condo project targeted by activists

Frances Bula
Sun

VANCOUVER – A Concord Pacific project in the booming Downtown Eastside has become the first to be targeted by local activists who are gearing for an anti-condo war.

The 154-unit Greenwich condo project — which is being built near Hastings and Carrall in the middle of what has been the city’s drug market, scavenging centre and residential-hotel enclave — has found itself temporarily stalled as area advocates protest a technical glitch in the approval process.

But those advocates say they’re willing to try to make a test case out of the project to highlight concerns about the onslaught of condos in a neighbourhood that has been traditionally the home for the region’s poorest.

“It’s kind of like a good target for us. And Concord, they’ve made their money in Vancouver,” says Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project.

She said the group, which has meetings scheduled with city planners today, is going to demand the city start taking action to enforce its own Downtown Eastside housing plan.

That plan, produced in 2005, said the low-income community that lives in 10,000 residential-hotel and social-housing units be preserved and that the neighbourhood remain predominantly low-income.

There is also a general provision in the plan that the city should “monitor the housing mix” and “develop tools to manage the rate of change, if necessary.”

The report’s statistics said there were 2,000 market condos in the area but a recent tally by the housing department showed that 1,600 new condo units had been approved since 2005, with construction of those projects stretching to 2010.

Pedersen said there are now three condos being built for every one social-housing unit and the neighbourhood is being overwhelmed.

Concord Pacific’s senior vice-president of development, Peter Webb, said that he understands the strategy the activists are using and he even sympathizes with their desire to make their case.

“I believe they need to make their voices heard.”

But he said there’s nothing in city policies that could prevent the company from building, since it has not asked for any extra density or a rezoning.

It is building according to what the current zoning allows for height and density, which means there are no grounds to deny a development permit.

But, he acknowledged, “from the development perspective, it’s worrisome. It’s key that a developer has a good relationship with the community.”

Ironically, the only additional feature the project has that the city could turn down is a request to transfer 10,000 square feet of density to the Concord project from a social-housing site owned by the Portland Hotel Society. The density transfer will give the society money needed to do necessary renovations on a building that will eventually house low-income residents.

Concord had at one point considered asking the city for significant additional density, for which it had been willing to provide some low-income units in the project. But Webb said the company abandoned that idea when it became clear that it was going to take city planners some time to decide on an overall policy about trading density for social housing.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

B.C. market still healthy as people ‘steadfast in their determination’ to own, report says

Joanne Lee-Young
Sun

Despite continuously rising prices, first-time homebuyers are still finding ways to get into the market, real estate firm Re/Max said in a report Tuesday.

Even if it means sacrifices such as purchasing a smaller property, taking longer to pay it off, or living in a less-than-ideal location, buyers “remain steadfast in their determination to purchase a home,” the report said.

In B.C., that is still translating into some multiple offers, and homes selling over asking price, said Karel Palla of Vancouver-based Re/Max Select Properties. But these are much fewer in number as “we head toward more normalcy,” he said.

“The market continues to be healthy, but we aren’t seeing the same urgency,” Palla said.

Re/Max estimates about 35 per cent of home sales in Greater Vancouver involve a first-time buyer. But with the average home price in the area now more than $600,000, buyers looking for affordability may want to look elsewhere. For example, a three-bedroom detached home can still be found in Abbotsford for as little as $237,500 and in Surrey for $279,000, the report said.

In Victoria, the average home price has eclipsed $500,000, but 62 per cent of sales went for less than that, as first-time buyers focused on entry-level condos under $250,000, Re/Max Camosun’s Wayne Schrader said.

In Kelowna, where the average price of a home is close to $500,000, first-time buyers are also considering alternative locations, the report said. But only 29 per cent of homes sold so far this year have been below the average price. While inventory levels have improved compared to a year ago, there is still a shortage of starter properties listed for sale, the report said.

Helping with affordability is lower interest rates, with the Bank of Canada again cutting its overnight lending rate on Tuesday, a move immediately reflected in variable mortgage rates and usually followed by fixed rates.

Buyers are also increasingly turning to “innovative financing,” with longer amortization periods — now as long as 40 years, up from 25 years — being used by 62 per cent of first-time buyers, the report said.

While that may conjure comparisons with loose-lending standards in the United States’ subprime-ravaged housing market, Michael Polzler, Re/Max’s regional director for Ontario and the Atlantic, said mortgage qualifications remain tougher in Canada.

“If the client is perceived of being a risk in Canada, it’s much harder to get this type of financing,” Polzler said.

And while longer-term mortgages may mean people are paying for their houses beyond retirement, such measures let younger buyers get a toehold in a real estate market that’s been on a seven-year bull run and is only now easing slightly, Polzler said. The Canadian Real Estate Association recently reported sales fell 7.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2008.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Boomers and older showing most interest in option yet to be approved

Frances Bula
Sun

VANCOUVER – Everyone could be in for a surprise when the city finally gets around to legalizing laneway houses.

That’s because there’s a good chance it won’t be only young people living in them.

All the signs indicate it’s the boomer generation and older who are most interested in this new form of housing that the city is considering allowing as one element of its EcoDensity plan.

That’s what city councillors, the city’s leading small-house builder, and fans of laneway housing are noticing.

“We really thought what the market was going to be was people trying to get in for the first time,” said Jake Fry, whose company Smallworks, builds backyard houses. He has been getting a flood of calls in the last few months as it began to appear that laneway houses were about to become a reality in Vancouver.

“What surprised [my partner] and I is how much older people are interested. They want to live there and rent out the house because they don’t have any money or they want to live in it themselves and let their kids live in the house.”

Other options he’s hearing about: putting elderly parents in the laneway house or putting the elderly parents’ caregiver in the laneway house.

Whichever the option, it turns out that seniors and those about to become seniors are definitely interested in having an extra small house on their properties.

“That group is three-quarters of our business now,” said Fry.

He’s also finding that those who work with seniors say this could be an important part of the solution to the coming eldercare/nursing-home crunch.

“The boomers are about 20 years away from that. And I know our health-care system isn’t anywhere near prepared,” said Melinda Shulz.

Schulz does marketing and community outreach for Retirement Concepts, one of the city’s seniors-home operators. So she knows how the market is going and how much room there is: nowhere near enough.

Besides just the space squeeze, Schulz said laneway houses help provide something that most seniors say they really want, which is the chance to stay in their neighbourhoods.

“That’s a big thing with a lot of them. And I really like the idea [of laneway houses] for seniors because there are lots of ways they can be adapted. We need more options.”

Another fan of laneway houses as a solution for the older generation is architect Brian Palmquist, who has been promoting the idea not only at EcoDensity forums and hearings, but for the last 20 years.

He said he got a noticeably positive response when he promoted the idea at the first EcoDensity forum.

“We have a preconception of older people as being staid and NIMBY. But most of the people who came to my presentation said, ‘What a great idea.’ “

Palmquist was involved in the debate over “monster” houses 20 years ago, when speculative builders were erecting houses that didn’t just use the maximum floor space allowable for their lots but also came with large garages attached. One of the measures the city took at that point to reduce the intrusiveness was insist that garages had to be separate buildings on the lane, away from the house.

Palmquist noticed at the time that helpful amendment set the stage for laneway housing, although the city wasn’t anywhere near ready at that point to accept it.

Now, Vancouverites do appear ready and none more so than Palmquist. He has a mother-in-law who now lives independently in Kerrisdale but may some day want or need something else. He also has two teenagers.

“One way or another, we have lots of potential for additional tenants,” he said.

Palmquist said the city could create 8,000 housing units just through laneway housing, all of it more affordable than anything else now being built.

So far, laneway housing has proven to be one of the most popular ideas of the sometimes controversial EcoDensity initiative. The city’s water and sewer systems have plenty of capacity to handle the extra units, especially since it appears many laneway houses might go into areas that have lost population in the past 30 years.

But they won’t be appearing immediately. Even after the EcoDensity charter is approved in June, city planners will then start consulting on the rules for laneway houses. Issues include whether the allowed size and height should be greater than current garages, whether parking should be required and if they can be strata-titled or will remain as rental units on standard city lots.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Cheryl Chan
Province

First-time homebuyers are using 40-year mortgages and low or no down payments to cope with soaring home-ownership costs in B.C., said a report released yesterday by real-estate firm RE/MAX.

The report examined first-time homebuying activity and trends in 21 Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna — three of the most expensive markets in the country.

B.C. housing sales have remained strong and unaffected by the downturn in the U.S. economy largely because of 40-year amortization periods, said Elton Ash, regional vice-president of RE/MAX Western Canada.

“When that tool came into the market place, 65 per cent of homeowners started using it,” he said.

“That improved the affordability and kept the market stronger than was predicted in 2007.”

Amortization periods — the length of time in which a mortgage is paid back — were extended from 25 years to 40 years two years ago.

The report credits “innovative financing” as the key to homeownership in today’s environment, with 62 per cent of surveyed homebuyers signing up for 30-, 35-, or 40-year mortgages and 38 per cent opting for the low or no downpayments.

While that may conjure comparisons with loose lending standards in the United States‘ subprime-ravaged housing market, Ash said Canadian homebuyers face tougher mortgage requirements.

“For zero down, borrowers have to prove a very strong credit rating and long-term employment situation,” he said. “It’s only a very small segment of the over-all mortgage portfolio.”

Most first-time homebuyers put down a five- to 10-per-cent downpayment, he added.

Adrian Mastracci, a Vancouver-based portfolio manager with KCM Wealth Management, referred to the 40-year mortgages as the “Freedom 95” plan, in reference to the Freedom 55 retirement plan once popularized by London Life.

“The banks will love you because you’re going to be paying for life,” Mastracci said.

If people don’t speed up repayments on such debt, they will find themselves paying it off well into their senior years, Mastracci said. “With a 40-year mortgage, you’re not buying, you’re just leasing long-term,” and will spend the first 30 years making mostly interest payments.

Karal Palla of RE/MAX Select Properties in Vancouver said the longer amortization period is a way for younger buyers to gain a toehold into the booming real-estate market.

“A lot of first-time homebuyers do qualify for a 20-year-mortgage, but they’re opting for 40 years to provide for an economic cushion and comfort zone,” Palla said.

First-time buyers account for 35 per cent of home sales in Greater Vancouver.

© The Vancouver Province 2008