Visitors hunt for decorating tips

PEDRO ARRAIS
Sun

Show homes for newhome projects are finished and furnished to sell homes. But they also help sell paint and furniture and accessories, in their second-purpose role of exemplars of interior design and decoration.

Deborah Patterson, inhouse designer for the Citta Group in Victoria, says there are challenges to using a show home for inspiration: Visitors seeking not a new home, but a new look have to be careful about borrowing elements from a show home because a design that looks fabulous in one setting might not necessarily work in another.

“In a show home, all the things are bought with an eye toward matching with each other,” she says. “Most people will invariably have personal items collected over years they need to fit in.”

Patterson is quick to point out that decorators can help clients incorporate treasured furniture pieces and mementos into a modern setting. Developers often offer a choice of themes and looks for their homes. The t wo most common are the traditional and the contemporary looks.

Some designers eschew the picture-perfect look for one that has more character.

“We didn’t want our show home to feel like a show home,” says Danielle Campagne, owner of IC Interior Design Group and co-designer for the Breakwater.

The James Bay project’s waterfront luxury townhomes have an upscale, urban-chic feel, but the rooms are lavished with antiques and original art instead of store-bought accessories.

“We felt a more eclectic mix-and-match would give the unit more chemistry — a lived-in feel. That’s why we chose one-of-a-kind art pieces… .”

Show home decor usually reflects the community in which the house is built. This gives out-of-town buyers a good touchstone as far as local tastes, designers say. For the Bishop’s Green new-home project on Saltspring Island, Campagne chose to give the show home’s interior a more whimsical look, with lambs in the kitchen and more natural, comfortable materials.

“It’s what’s appropriate for the target market,” she says. “There is a big arts community on Saltspring, so we put in an unfinished picture on an easel on an upper landing.”

While show homes inevitably exemplify a clever use of space and innovative design, they also share a common theme — comfort. All the interiors are warm places to relax after a day at work.

“I want people to feel as if they could kick back and put their feet up,” says Glenda Castelsky, principal of Details Interiors of Qualicum Beach. She created the interior design for Eaglewood at Qualicum Beach development. Because the target client would move from a big city, she designed the show home as a retreat, with lots of slate and wood interposed with warm fabrics. “I wanted the decor to be realistic and something that tells the buyer that they can actually live there.”

While looky-loos at open houses go away with ideas for their own homes, it takes more than buying the same furnishings and using the same colour palette to recreate what a designer or decorator has designed.

“It’s more of a feeling than physical attributes,” says John Larson, owner of C.A. Design, responsible for the building design of Eaglewood. “It’s as much geometry as the physical materials. It’s the ability to create harmony from a collection of pieces — and not everybody has that skill.”

Local market neither boom nor bust, but balanced

BOB RANSFORD
Sun

Free-falling stock markets. Bank mergers and bankruptcies on Wall Street. The U.S. credit crunch. Slowing real estate sales. All of this makes for great headline news. Much of it is bound to create a certain amount of fear if not panic among some.

But behind the sensational headlines is a good news story for homebuyers.

Before I outline that good story, I must admit that a turn in the economic trend line brings uncertainty and with uncertainty there are both challenges and opportunities.

Most of the challenges are about timing. When will we feel the pain locally? How long will the downturn last? When will markets bottom out? How long before interest rates begin to rise?

Timing is hard to predict and we know that in making important decisions, timing is everything. But if you are in a position to buy a home today there has never been a better time to buy than today.

Will there be a better time at some other point in the future? Maybe. It all depends on your individual circumstances.

The reality of long-term realestate-market trends suggests that if you buy today and you intend on living in your home for more than a couple of years, the odds are that your investment in your home will be secure.

Real estate markets are cyclical but despite their ups and downs, home prices in Metro Vancouver have appreciated, on average, more than five per cent every year for the last 30 years.

That’s the good news that is inherent in investing in a home. If you are buying to live in your home, you couldn’t be making a better investment.

If you are closely monitoring market cycles to look for an especially opportune time to enter the market regardless of the personal circumstances that might impact your decision to buy, the short-term trend line is heading in the right direction.

Since 1980, home prices in Metro Vancouver have gone through three cycles where prices have risen significantly and adjusted downward again.

The first peak was in 1981, followed closely by the 1982 market adjustment that was felt across North America, with prices bottoming out around 1985.

Prices recovered to 1981 levels by late 1988 and continued upward to peak again in late 1991.

Then there was another shorter adjustment, but when average home prices bottomed out in 1991, they were still significantly higher than the 1985.

Our economic malaise in BC in the mid-1990s led to a longer decline in home prices between late 1994 and 2001, but again prices never even came close to sliding below 1991 levels.

The boom we have just experienced had the steepest climb, starting in 2001. Housing affordability became a top-of-mind issue for almost everyone because prices appreciated much quicker than incomes in a market where supply didn’t keep pace with demand.

Looking at the long-term trend line shows that we have been through anything but a normal market.

So, the real good news for homebuyers is that we are heading into a normal market. Supply and demand will be much more in balance.

Call it a buyer’s market if you wish. But as buyers begin to realize that it is a good time to buy, supply will get eaten up. But this new demand driven by opportunity won’t mean a spike in prices. Despite tighter financing conditions for new real estate projects because of the fallout from the U.S. credit crunch, developers will be able to justify new project because buyers are steadily consuming product in a buyer’s market.

That’s how a normal market works.

On a long-term chart, we will see this next period displayed with the trend line that shows a peak a few months back and a small downward dip followed by a gradual readjustment over the next couple of years. Looking way back, prices will have appreciated considerably, whether you are measuring the top of our current cycle or the bottom we haven’t yet experienced. 

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. E-mail: [email protected]

 

Pete McMartin
Sun

I have some good news!

Amid all the talk of slowdowns, meltdowns and — in the case of a news story Thursday that drug abuse is rampant among aging baby boomers — just plain downers, this heartening information comes to us about improved employment figures.

Well, figure, anyway. It’s in the low ones. It seems the non-profit Credit Counselling Society of B.C. is doing such gangbuster business these days that it’s hired three more staff to keep up with the sudden demand of hundreds of people who are now calling up every day begging the society to teach them how to unburden themselves of their crushing debt load. This sudden influx means that clients must now wait a week for an interview, when before they could get in to see a counsellor the same day. But three new jobs! And readers complain there’s nothing positive to read in the paper anymore.

On the other hand, there is a bit of bad news.

According to a Statistics Canada report released in June of this year — three months before the dominoes started to fall on Wall Street — Canadians were incurring more and larger mortgages, bigger lines of credit and more credit-card debt than ever before, and spending it, largely, on renovations and big-ticket items like cars, flat-screen TVs and appliances. The news story in The Sun described Canadians as “spending like drunken sailors.” Yo ho ho and a bottle of your finest Bordeaux, waiter!

Or this:

An Ipsos-Reid poll in May found that 78 per cent of all respondents did not have enough money saved to cover three months worth of expenses.

“With most Canadians not having enough savings to get them through an emergency of up to three months,” the poll report wondered, “the question arises as to how Canadians will cope with an unexpected emergency should it arise, such as a sudden illness or loss of a job. The answer for most appears to be to enter in debt, with two-thirds (65 per cent) of Canadians agreeing … that they consider their line of credit to be their emergency funds.”

In other words, to cover unexpected debt, most Canadians have put away — oy vey — debt. It’s funny, in a terrifying sort of way.

Funnier still? Another Ipsos-Reid survey found that seven in 10 Canadians were planning on some type of home renovation in the next two years, with the primary reason being they wanted to make their home more attractive, presumably to show it off to best effect when the bank officers come by to repossess it.

Exactly why we’ve become a society of spendthrifts is a thesis I haven’t room here to explore, but one good explanation comes from SFU Prof. Lindsay Meredith, whose disciplines include marketing and economics. Basically — and I hope I’m getting Meredith correct on this — he suggests we have let our greed get the better of us, and that marketers and financial institutions have cultivated and capitalized on that greed. Or, as I might put it, we’re saps.

Meredith’s prescription for fiscal responsibility?

“Ultimately, it comes down to your and my ability to look that marketer in the eye and say, ‘B—– off!'”

But that would take self-denial and discipline, which Americans and, to a slightly lesser degree as to be negligible, we Canadians, have shown a willingness to do.

In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder when I hear comments about the greed of Wall Street and its responsibility for bringing the economy to the brink of ruin.

Wall Street and all its permutations may have financed our glass houses — with their granite kitchen countertops and flat-screen TVs and new cars in the garage — but we willingly lived in them.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Brian Morton
Sun

Canada is returning to a more “normal” pace of home construction, although B.C.’s slowdown will be less dramatic than the nation as a whole, according to an official with the Conference Board of Canada.

“B.C. has a slightly smaller decline [in housing starts],” Michael Burt, associate director, industrial outlook, said in an interview Thursday following the release of a report entitled Conference Board’s Canadian Industrial Outlook: Canada’s Residential Construction Industry — Summer 2008. “Healthy immigration is probably the single biggest factor. But the economic forecast for B.C. is definitely above the national average.”

Burt said the slowdown is an overdue correction in the market, after housing supply outstripped demand for several years. He said Canada is now moving into a buyers’ market as home construction and sales activity return to a more normal pace.

Asked to describe what a more “normal” pace is, Burt replied: “We’ve had six consecutive years of housing starts in excess of 200,000 [per year]. We haven’t seen a boom like that since the 1970s. What we’re expecting to see is housing starts drop down to an average of 185,000 a year, a much more sustainable pace.”

According to the report, Canadian builders can expect their second consecutive year of lower profits in 2008 as demand for new home construction weakens.

The report noted that after years of large increases in many markets, price appreciation has slowed considerably. It said that new home prices are rising at their slowest pace since 2002 because weaker economic conditions and less affordability are slowing demand.

The report also noted that while builders’ profit levels doubled between 2004 and 2006, industry profits declined by 16 per cent in 2007 and are expected to fall another three per cent to $3.6 billion this year.

The report concluded that profits will fall again in 2009, before starting to improve in 2010 and beyond as the market stabilizes and demand returns.

Burt said that starts nationally are expected to drop 14.5 per cent from 2008 to 2011 (214,000 to 185,000) while starts in B.C. will drop by just 11 per cent over the same period (36,000 to 32,000).

He said starts totalled 230,000 nationally in 2007, compared to 39,000 in B.C.

National starts are expected to level off in 2011, he added, and in B.C. in 2010.

Burt said that despite the economic turmoil, “Broadly speaking, we have a fairly positive outlook for the Canadian economy. And B.C. [will grow] at about twice the rate of the national average over the next year or two.”

Burt also said that market conditions in the U.S. have had little effect on the Canadian market and that there is little evidence of a looming market crash here. He also said that lending practices in Canada are much more prudent.

Meanwhile, Marie-Christine Bernard, the board’s associate director of the provincial forecast service, said in an interview that while jobs in the construction sector are expected to drop in B.C., there will still be plenty of work.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Gerry Bellett
Sun

VANCOUVER – The owner of a building lot who wants to build a four-storey retail-residential building at 2745 East Hastings Street has started construction on the site without a proper building permit.

According to a report from city hall staff, work on excavation and foundation footings has been carried out on the site.

City council is being asked to authorize staff to seek a court injunction against the owner and to place a notice in the property’s file in the land title office warning any prospective purchasers of the situation.

On Nov. 10, 2005, the developer filed for a building permit but it was not issued.

Will Johnston, the city’s director of licences and inspections said there were a “number of administrative problems with the application and also, no fees were paid.”

Johnston said he felt the issue could be settled soon.

“We are going to council because we need to convince the developer to get his permit,” he said.

Johnston said it is illegal for anyone to begin excavation work in the city without a permit.

The property is owned by a numbered company with its headquarters in Richmond.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

‘We are now moving into a buyer’s market’

Mario Toneguzzi
Province

CALGARY — Rising labour and material costs as well as a continued cooling in the housing sector will rip into profits of Canadian home builders for a second consecutive year, according to a report released yesterday by the Conference Board of Canada.

As demand for new-home construction weakens, profits this year are expected to dip by three per cent compared with a year ago to $3.6 billion. This follows a 16.4-per-cent year-over-year plunge in 2007.

The Conference Board report said profits will drop another 6.6 per cent to $3.3 billion in 2009 before swinging upward in 2010 through to 2012. Its forecast says year-over-year increases in 2010 to 2012 will be 6.7 per cent, 4.1 per cent and 2.3 per cent, respectively, and peak at $3.8 billion at the end of the forecast cycle.

“Costs escalating at frenzied paces ripped a strip off profits last year,” said the report

“It was the first time in recent years that cost growth outpaced revenue growth. Despite a much slower pace of cost growth, industry profits will fall again this year and in 2009 as slowing construction activity and input-price appreciation take their toll on the industry.”

Profits for the home-building industry peaked at $4.4 billion at the height of the housing boom in 2006.

The slower pace of economic growth throughout the country “will push Canadian housing markets into an overdue correction. The industry has been building above the rate that demographics and economic growth can support, and now the time has come for a reduction in building activity,” said the report, adding the sales-to-new-listings ratio has been on a downward trend, putting the market into a more balanced state.

Because of that, home-price appreciation has been steadily decelerating with new-home prices rising 4.2 per cent in May on a year-over-year basis, their weakest pace since 2002.

“High costs will continue to plague the industry,” added the report. “Labour is scarce and expensive, and although lumber prices remain weak, other materials [such as steel and concrete] are expensive and costly to transport.

“When combined with weakening demand and price appreciation, the result will be a drop in profits this year and next. Profits will begin to recover in the outlying years of the forecast but stay below their 2006 peak.”

The report said the industry’s costs jumped by 10 per cent in 2007 to $100.3 billion and will increase a further 1.4 per cent this year.

Meanwhile revenues in 2007 were up 8.8 per cent from the year before to $104 billion and expect only a 1.3-per-cent increase this year to $105.3 billion. “This slowdown is an overdue correction in the market, after housing supply outstripped demand for several years,” said Michael Burt, associate director, industrial outlook. “We are now moving into a buyer’s market, as home construction and sales activity return to a more normal pace.”

© The Vancouver Province 2008