Ephraim Vecina
The Vancouver Sun

An influx of foreign capital spurred by rock-bottom exchange rates has made Vancouver’s offerings the world’s most desired high-end properties, according to a recently released report by Knight Frank.

The consultancy’s latest world health report revealed that prices for prime real estate (defined as being in the market’s top 5 per cent) in Vancouver grew an extraordinary 24.5 per cent over the past year.

“A lack of supply, coupled with foreign demand, spurred on by a weaker Canadian dollar explain [Vancouver’s] stellar performance,” the report stated, as quoted by HuffPost Business Canada.

Meanwhile, Toronto—considered as Canada’s second-best performing housing market—saw an 8 per cent increase in luxury property prices.

These developments accompanied a spectacular rise in overall Canadian home average prices, growing from 4 to 14 times faster than the rest of the world.

The growing concern of affordability has prompted several quarters to petition the federal government for decisive action in cooling down the country’s markets. Such calls have only intensified in the wake of the Royal Bank of Canada’s warning that Vancouver and Toronto real estate are becoming “dangerously unaffordable”.

RBC added that as much as luxury real estate is taking the lion’s share of the profits, single-family homes have seen a far greater growth cared compared to condo units.

“Any further deterioration in the affordability of single-detached homes would entrench these segments as ‘luxury’ forms of housing in Vancouver and Toronto, available only to wealthy households,” the Bank warned.

Copyright © 2016 Key Media Pty Ltd

Justin da Rosa
Other

Your clients may soon have a more difficult time qualifying for a home, according to one leading economist.

Past bids to cool hot housing markets through mortgage rule tweaking hasn’t worked, according to one economist who suggests the government may look to further tighten the rules.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Keep in mind they started this process in July of 2012 and that was the first change,” Michael Campbell, economist for mortgage network Verico, told REP. “So now we have this change here and yet it hasn’t started to slow down the hot markets at all.”

Campbell is referencing the latest mortgage tweak to high ratio mortgages that went into effect February 15.

The minimum down payment for new insured mortgages increased from 5% to 10% for the portion of the house price above $500,000.

The changes were meant to reduce taxpayer exposure while supporting long-term stability of the housing market, according to the ministry.

And while many predicted the change would impact the hot Vancouver and Toronto markets, Campbell argues it hasn’t.

“We didn’t see any change in the market; the market just completely exploded after that,” Campbell said. “In Vancouver, in Victoria, in Toronto – the hot markets stayed hot.”

Because of this, the government may look to implement even further tightening. But would that be the right move? After all, real estate has been a major driver of – what is, at this point a struggling – economy.

“You have to ask why you want to cool the market first,” Campbell said. “Every homeowner is pretty happy right now, but there are other things too; the renovation industry is thrilled, the furniture selling industry is thrilled, painters are thrilled.”

Copyright © 2016 Key Media Pty Ltd

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349 West Georgia Street Post Office Re-development

Kenneth Chan
other

The immense scale of the proposed mixed-use redevelopment of the old Canada Post processing building will accelerate the inevitable eastward expansion of downtown Vancouver’s dense urban core.

B.C. Investment Management Corporation, the owner of the former post office property, has partnered with developer Bentall Kennedy and local architecture firm Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership (MCM) to deliver the redevelopment of the 1958-built concrete and steel structure into retail, residential, and office uses.

The existing post office building will be retained, and in order to support the high costs associated with the transforming the structure for other uses additional density is required. But the site’s full potential is restricted by view cones, and the compact short, multi-tower built form is reflective of that.

Preliminary plans by the developer consist of constructing five new towers up to 19 storeys high on top of the existing 686,000-square-foot building – effectively the redevelopment’s podium – framed by Dunsmuir Street to the north, West Georgia Street to the south, Homer Street to the west, and Hamilton Street to the southeast. The site is across the street from the Vancouver Public Library and Queen Elizabeth Theatre and within close proximity of Larwill Park, the future home of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Altogether, about 900,000 square feet of floor area will be added to the building, which will give the overall project a floor area exceeding 1.5 million square feet.

Approximately 300,000 square feet of retail space, varying from big open spaces to small units, will occupy the first four floors.

The reconfigured podium will provide the downtown retail market with much-needed large-scale retail spaces suitable for larger retailers. Three large retail spaces, accessible using escalators from the retail concourse along Homer Street, are planned: a 27,200-square-foot space on the ground level, 75,000-square-feet space on the second floor, and a 102,000 square-foot space taking up the entire floor plate on the third level.

Such vast retail spaces could potentially be occupied by a grocery store and department stores such as Le Maison Simons and Saks Fifth Avenue. Both fashion retailers have expressed great interest in establishing a major presence in the downtown retail market, but suitable space has been difficult to come by.

Small retail units, ranging between 650 square feet and 4,100 square feet, will have street storefronts punctured onto the building’s rose-coloured granite facades along all four sides of the structure to break open the fortress’ shell and connect it to the public realm.

“Right now, the building is for industrial use, but that’s not going to fit into downtown,” said Mark Whitehead, architect and partner at MCM, during a media tour of the post office building. “I think it’s one of the reasons this area is so breadth of people. The first thing we want to do is amend the urban fabric by introducing light and connectivity at the ground level.”

Two restaurant spaces are slated for the building’s ground floor corner space at the intersection of Homer and West Georgia streets.

There will be four residential towers over the northernmost areas of the building, creating the bulk of the space required needed to construct 850 residential units, including 650 units of market rental housing and 200 units of market condominiums.

The rooftop of the building will be converted into a large courtyard and green space that residents will have access to.

Some residential units will also be built into the building, within the outer edges of the upper two floors. However, the main use of these two levels will be parking: The inner cores of the upper two floors, roughly 56,000 square feet of space on each level, will be turned into 292 stalls of vehicle parking.

Vehicle access to the upper parking levels, sitting atop the retail levels, will be through a new up-spiral access ramp cut into each level at the very centre of the building.

Parking spaces will also be found within the completed redevelopment’s lower three levels. There are currently two lower levels, but the lowermost level will be excavated to create additional space for a third level of underground parking.

Normally, for a project of this size and density, four or five floors of underground space would be excavated to fulfill the building’s parking needs.

“The complexities behind this parking is representative of all the challenges we face in repurposing this building,” said Tony Astles, the Executive Vice-President of Bentall Kennedy. “Anything we put into this project, the present conditions requires parking… This will be parking even at a reduced level [below City mandated quotas].”

On the other hand, no shortage in bike parking spaces is expected as the plans consist of building a 1,000 secure bike parking facility.

An office tower addition to the building on the West Georgia Street side will be the project’s tallest new-build. Portions of the building’s levels along West Georgia Street will be repurposed as office space as a vertical extension of the new office tower floors above.

There are no plans to develop the existing ground level parking area that borders the building’s West Georgia Street facade into useable floor area. Instead, the space will be converted into a plaza with patio space and a street level entry into building’s retail.

Although the building is being repurposed for new uses, most of the historical features and elements will be preserved and restored, which includes the entire facade and the two 19-foot-tall aluminum Canadian coats of arms perched high above the exterior on West Georgia Street.

“The City really considers this a heritage building, even though it is not registered or protected in anyway,” said Donald Luxton, the project’s heritage consultant and the former president of Heritage Vancouver. “So the proposal is moving in this direction, to hopefully secure it as a heritage site.”

Project proponents considered options other than retaining the post office building structure. One option would demolish the entire city block structure to enable a completely new purpose-built redevelopment while the other option – a hybrid heritage retention plan – would retain the historic West Georgia Street facade and demolish the northernmost two-thirds of the structure, but these options were not economically nor environmentally feasible.

It is estimated that the option of saving the post office building will reduce the need to create 50,000 cubic feet of demolition waste, which would require 7,000 truck trips to transport.

“If we started with a greenfield site, in theory we can dig as deep as we want to accommodate parking whereas in this [existing] structure we need to find creative and very complicated ways to introduce interstitial floors, between floors, to accommodate additional parking,” said Astles. “The greenfield site became more practical and economic than retention of the existing building.”

“Having said that, we were determined to try to make this heritage retention work, and with luck we’ll be able to do so… and that will be our proposal if we can work with all the constituencies to make it happen.”

Some structural changes to the building, such as the reinforcement of support columns, will be necessary to support new parking levels and the towers that emerge from the existing rooftop.

“Demolishing and starting from scratch is much easier to do,” said Mark Thompson, another architect and partner at MCM. “What we’ve discovered in analyzing the building [is] that the heritage value of the building is in the whole structure, the fact that this is such a large, robust, intact, and monolithic building. That’s really where the value is in terms of its heritage value… That’s our starting point and our proposal to the city, and it’s harder to do that.”

Most redevelopment projects in Vancouver that incorporate an existing structure of heritage significance usually only retain the facade while most or all of the innards, the floor plates, are gutted for a new-build. Some examples of this rehabilitation and redevelopment method include Woodward’s, 720 Robson Street (Old Navy), 610 Granville Street (The Hudson/Steve Nash Downtown Sports Club), and 26 Southwest Marine Drive (Chrysler Building is now a Canadian Tire, Best Buy, and Sport Chek).

In contrast, Bentall Kennedy’s plan is more aligned with the heritage redevelopments of the Stock Exchange Building at 475 Howe Street (20-storey office tower built over existing 1929-built, 11-storey building) and 564 Beatty Street (four-storey office expansion on top of 1911-built, 3-storey building).

Despite the complex nature of the post office redevelopment project, environmental sustainability is still a key aspect for the project and a LEED Gold environmental certification will be pursued.

When complete, the yet-to-be-named project will create working spaces for 4,000 people and living spaces for another 4,000. Construction could begin before the end of the decade, and until then the building will be leased for film production purposes.

Canada Post has vacated the building for nearly two years. In 2014, the crown corporation moved its West Coast sorting facilities from the old downtown building into a new $200-million, 700,000-square-foot state-of-the-art complex at Vancouver International Airport.

Just eight years earlier in 2008, the federal government decided to sell the building to B.C. Investment Management Corporation for $130 million.

©2016 Buzz Connected Media Inc.

1% of detached houses are empty but… 12.5% of condos are also vacant

MATTHEW ROBINSON, ROB SHAW AND JOANNE LEE-YOUNG
The Vancouver Sun

Most of city’s vacant properties are condominiums: new research

Vancouver’s soaring single-family home prices have been blamed in part on foreigners snapping up investment properties and leaving them empty.

That myth was dispelled by results of a study released by the city Tuesday that shows only one per cent of single-family homes are vacant.

Of more concern in a city strapped for affordable housing is the 12.5 per cent non-occupancy rate for condominiums, which account for most of the city’s 10,800 empty homes.

City councillors are calling on the provincial government to take steps to help ensure vacant units are filled. That could include punitive tax measures against owners of vacant properties. However, the number of vacant properties in Vancouver is not far out of line with the rest of Metro Vancouver. The city’s overall vacancy rate of 4.8 per cent in 2014 is only about one to 1.5 per cent higher than Metro, said Bruce Townson, chief executive of Ecotagious. Ecotagious is a software company hired by the city last year to analyze domestic electricity consumption. The company pored over more than a decade of anonymized BC Hydro data for 225,000 homes in the city and Townson presented its findings to councillors Tuesday.

The vacancy rate in Vancouver for single-family homes, duplexes and row houses is only about one per cent, and that rate has been static since 2002, according to the report. Meanwhile, the combined vacancy rate for condominiums and purpose-built rental apartments is 7.2 per cent. That number is in line with the findings of a 2013 study by the Urban Futures Institute, which put unoccupied apartments in Vancouver at 6.2 per cent on 2011 Census day.

The cross-Canada average of vacant apartments for census metropolitan areas over 200,000 people was seven per cent, according to the study. Quebec had the lowest rate, at five per cent, followed by Toronto at 5.4 per cent. Near the mid-point of the list was Calgary at 8.6 per cent, while Victoria was third highest at 11.5 per cent, topped by London (13.5 per cent) and Windsor (16.5 per cent).

Vancouver’s highest overall vacancy rate (including houses and apartments) in 2014 — at 7.4 per cent — was in Point Grey, Fairview and Kitsilano. The non-occupancy rate in the downtown peninsula that year was six per cent. It was 4.5 per cent in Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Grandview-Woodland and Hastings-Sunrise, and 3.4 per cent in South Cambie, Shaughnessy, Arbutus Ridge, Dunbar-Southlands and Kerrisdale. Non-occupancy was lowest in Renfrew-Collingwood, Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Riley Park, Oakridge, Marpole, Sunset, Victoria-Fraserview and Killarney, which came in at 2.9 per cent.

The decision to clump neighbourhoods into geographic sectors — as noted by Coun. George Affleck — meant that the nono ccupancy rates for smaller areas of interest such as Coal Harbour or Dunbar, not to mention individual apartment buildings, were blended into their surroundings. City staff said BC Hydro was protective of the data for privacy reasons so more detailed information could not be released.

A home was deemed non-occupied in a given month if its electricity use showed little variability for 25 or more days, a number selected to allow for infrequent use of a home. If a home was not occupied for each of four “nonheating” months — August, September and the following June and July — it was deemed empty for a given year.

That methodology would catch homes purchased by investors and left perpetually empty, but it would miss homes used during summer months and left empty the rest of the year, or homes rented out on Airbnb.

Home buyers and prospective renters have fretted for years that investors were snapping up homes and leaving them empty, cutting supply and boosting prices in the process.

Mayor Gregor Robertson had asked Premier Christy Clark in a letter last year to consider a series of measures — including amendments to the Vancouver Charter and the Community Charter — to strengthen the ability of municipalities to ensure vacant units are filled. The premier ducked the issue of vacancy in her reply letter.

Robertson and city councillors voted Tuesday to reiterate the request for those legal tools.

Clark said she intended to read the report.

“I think we are all concerned about the vacancy rate in Vancouver in particular because we have to be concerned about it hollowing out neighbourhoods,” Clark said.

When asked if the province would consider putting a tax on vacant property, Clark said the province had “heard a range of different options and ideas, a lot of which are good. So the Ministry of Finance is right now … really drilling down to understand which of the solutions that have come forward are going to be the best ones.”

Matthew Bourke, the city lead on the empty homes report, said Vancouver could not reduce the number of empty homes without help from the province because the Vancouver Charter does not allow council to mandate occupancy.

“If council did want to take action on this issue, it would absolutely require that we work with senior government,” said Bourke. “Given the significant housing affordability challenges in Vancouver and the intense pressure on renters and rental stock, the city needs to do what we can on this issue.”

NDP housing critic David Eby said the vacant housing numbers are another reminder that the B.C. government should be following the advice of academics and taxing vacant properties.

“Absolutely, they should be implementing the vacancy tax,” he said, adding the province should also amend the Vancouver Charter so the city could address the issue.

“I am very grateful that the city continues to push on this issue because whatever the number is, whether it’s seven per cent, or 12 per cent or five per cent, we need those units in circulation as either housing for purchase or rental,” Eby said.

Tom Davidoff, one of 10 professors at UBC and Simon Fraser University who earlier this year suggested a 1.5 per cent real estate surcharge on absentee owners could be pooled into an affordability fund, said his initial impression is that five per cent non-occupancy “is somewhat surprising and at the lower end of what one would expect.”

He explained what might account for this: “There is total vacancy and then also vacancy that happens when units aren’t used for local housing. It could be the difference between vacancy (as considered by this study’s methodology) and what would be considered underutilized.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Steve Randall
Other

The high demand for condos in Toronto and Vancouver is fuelling talk of a housing bubble. The latest stats on housing starts show high levels in BC but low levels in the Prairies and BMO Capital Markets economist Robert Kavcic is warning of the disparate Canadian housing market.

In a client note he wrote: On one end of the spectrum, residential construction activity is in outright recession, while on the other, new construction has flared well above past highs.” He cautioned: “We’ve long been defenders of the Canadian housing market against the rabid bears, but activity in Vancouver at least is making that case a lot tougher to make.”

Copyright © 2016 Key Media Pty Ltd

As a real estate investor, you will come across units with tenants in-situ. Is this a reliable income source or a troublesome and expensive headache?

Frank O’Brien
Other

As an investor it is likely you will come upon the purchase of a condominium that already has a rental tenant in place. This can be a bonus, since you will receive income immediately without the hassle of advertising or screening tenants. However, it is not always an ideal situation. 

Here are five things you should consider before committing.

Tour the Suite Without the Tenant

Get permission to walk through the suite, preferably on a Sunday. Are there signs of a party? Do you smell marijuana smoke? Is the suite clean? Are there signs of damage, especially to doors and flooring, or are more people living in the suite than expected? Also, quietly ask the strata corporation if there have been complaints about the tenant. 

How Much is the Rent? 

In BC the annual rental increase allowed in 2016 is 2.9 per cent, but it has been in the 2.1 per cent range for years. However, when a tenant vacates, the landlord can raise the rent to perceived market value. If the in-situ tenant has been renting for some time, the rent may be much lower than you could achieve in the current market. If you decide you don’t want the tenant, arrange for the existing owner to end the tenancy if your timing allows. This requires two months’ notice to the tenant, but means you start with a clean slate. 

 

There can also be concerns if the rent is unusually high or low. A relatively high rate of rent should prompt you to ask whether that rent is sustainable, and how long the tenant has been paying it for.

If they are on a short lease, with the rent jacked up, you can’t always be sure it hasn’t been done to make the property seem more attractive. Always question suspicious-looking figures, particularly when you’ve compared them to the rent for similar condominiums in the same neighbourhood. 

What is the Lease Agreement? 

If a tenant is on a fixed rent, you cannot make them leave and the tenant cannot break the lease just because the property has changed hands. You can attempt to negotiate a break-lease situation on mutually agreeable terms, but there is no obligation for either to accept. When a property is sold, a lease is transferred to the new owner, not voided. Occasionally, special clauses have previously been inserted to allow the void of a lease in the situation of a sale, but this is uncommon.

 

A periodic lease, which is sometimes adopted automatically after a fixed-term has lapsed, will often see the tenant able to provide a shortened period of notice to vacate. If you’re hoping for a long-term renter, this may not be an attractive prospect. However, if you are unhappy with the current tenant, this can provide you an opportunity to re-advertise the home for rent.

Ask About Side Agreements 

Sometimes the existing landlord may have agreed to certain conditions, perhaps allowing a pet or providing special repairs and improvements to the suite. In some situations you may be bound to these agreements, especially if they are in writing. 

How Easy Would it be to Rent? 

Ask yourself whether you could easily rent the condo if it were vacant. This means checking out Craigslist and other sources for comparable condo rentals in the area. Putting a tenant in place that you have personally checked out may be worth it to you in the long run. 

© 2016 Real Estate Weekly

A new report has told us what industry insiders already knew ? that the issue of home vacancies in Vancouver has been massively overblown. But why?

Joannah Connolly
Other

It’s one of Vancouver’s most popular public perceptions about the local real estate market – the belief that the high number of homes being left vacant is a key factor in the rise of home prices in the city.

So it was no surprise that the local media this week, including REW.ca/News, were all over the announced outcome of a new City-commission study into the true extent of home vacancies. It’s not the first time such a report has been done, but it’s a comprehensive study and it certainly adds robust data to the existing information.

For anyone who missed the story, the report found that home vacancies in Vancouver in 2014 (the study period) stood at 4.8 per cent – which is actually slightly down from the 4.9 per cent in 2002. The vast majority of vacancies were in condo-apartment units, of which 7.2 per cent were vacant, compared with just 1 per cent of single-family homes across the city (1.4 per cent on the West Side). REW.ca’s story explains further the various breakdowns by neighbourhood, so have a read of that here.

Our reaction at REW.ca? “Well, duh.”

The results of the study come as absolutely no surprise to yours truly, or anyone inside the real estate and development industry. Previous studies have already told us that vacancy rates in Vancouver are typical for any city, and we all know that there are much more obvious reasons for Vancouver’s rising home prices.

The results are a very far cry from public’s commonly held misconception that there are swathes of abandoned houses being left to decay across the city, all owned by selfish (probably foreign) investors not bothering to put the homes in the rental pool, caring only about the land value appreciation. Now, I’m not saying that never happens – of course, it does – but this is rare in relation to the overall market.

So, if this picture is not accurate, why do so many believe it to be true? Well, sensationalized mainstream media headlines such as this one and this one (to pick just two of many) don’t help. Nor do popular blogs such as Beautiful Empty Homes of Vancouver. Such coverage tends to focus on a tiny aspect of the market without putting it into the context of the bigger picture, which is misleading to the public, who have no way of knowing any better. After all, mainstream media is the most trusted voice around, and they’ve got the biggest loudspeaker. So if their stories suggest that foreign buyers leaving homes vacant are pushing up prices, why wouldn’t the public believe them?

But the other reason is something that I’ve been gradually learning in my role as editor-in-chief of Glacier Media’s real estate publications. It’s that, whenever there is a perceived problem, people want someone to blame for it. I’ve been asked many times on TV and radio, “Who is to blame for Vancouver’s high prices?” I’ve attended sessions entitled, “How can we fix the market?” People always want to believe the worst, and it always has to be somebody’s, or something’s, fault.

But it’s also a vocal minority that is doing the complaining, and the (often racially biased) finger-pointing. This group has a big loudspeaker, too. Whereas the rest of the people – many of whom have benefitted enormously from the rise in real estate prices – don’t get represented in the debate.

I guarantee you that if Vancouver’s real estate market “problem” was “fixed” and property prices were to come down, things would be no different. There would be a whole new set of problems, a different group of highly vocal, disgruntled residents, and a whole new round of finger-pointing and blame-laying.

That being the case, how can we help with affordability, which is still a very real issue for some people? Well, we do know that while the percentage of vacant homes may be small and stable, the number of total empty homes has increased, simply because of the rise in the total number of homes in the city (again, mostly condos). So, although vacancies are not to blame for rising prices, there’s nothing to say that we can’t find a way to tax those properties that are not contributing to the economy or the rental pool. The team at UBC Sauder School of Business has come up with a robust proposal for this (one that is not racially biased), and you can find out more about that here.

© 2016 Real Estate Weekly

City doing little to deal with problem

Allen Garr
Van. Courier

The continued destruction of perfectly usable heritage homes in Vancouver is not the only example of the Vision Vancouver-controlled city council’s failed policies to encourage affordable housing and healthy communities. While demolitions continue apace, concern about the ability to own a home in this city is being eclipsed in some quarters by the ability to rent a space.

Even though the city trumpets the construction of new rental housing, it is not nearly enough to keep up. Vacancy rates are below one per cent. That is proving even more problematic since the economic disrupter known as Airbnb has invaded the scene, encouraging practices that are most often illegal. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

The online booking service has had a meteoric rise since its beginning in 2007 when two young San Franciscans devised a scheme to cover a portion of their rent. They installed three air mattresses — that’s the “air” part — in their apartment’s loft and offered guests a hot breakfast as part of the rental, which made it a bed and breakfast. Less than a decade later, Airbnb boasts listings in thousands of cities around the world, more than 15 million nights booked, and a value of somewhere in the range of $25.5 billion. That makes it, by some estimations, the most successful start-up in history.

The appeal of Airbnb is obvious. All wrapped in the cuddly packaging of “shared economy,” people with a spare room can supplement their incomes. If you have a basement suite or an investment property or two you can make far more using the service of Airbnb and renting out by the night than you could with monthly rentals.

There is, of course, push back from folks around the world for the simple reason that a resource that may have been designed for long-term housing, has now been given over to tourists. And that puts the likelihood of affordable and available housing for the one half of Vancouverites who are renters even further out of reach.

The website “Inside Airbnb” managed by New Yorker Murray Cox gives results from sifting through listings for a number of major world cities. From what he has scoped out in Vancouver most recently, we see there are 4,728 listings. And while it is fair to say someone renting out a spare bedroom for a few nights a month may not influence the availability of rental housing, there is this little factoid: More than 67 per cent of the listings, or 3,179, are for either apartments or whole houses. The biggest concentration of listings is in the West End with the Birkenstock Beltway through Kitsilano and Point Grey coming a close second.

Imagine what that does to a neighbourhood where, instead of long-term residents, you have a come-and-go crowd of tourists who participate in no other way than paying for a night’s lodging.

Now for this being largely illegal activity: When the issue is raised with the city, there is just a lot of shoulder shrugging and finger pointing at the province — they should do something.

But, in fact, it is within the city’s power to act. Vancouver’s own zoning and development bylaw section 10.21.6 says, “No person shall use or permit to be used any dwelling unit for a period of less than one month unless such unit forms part of a hotel or is used for bed and breakfast accommodation.”

Which means, not only should these property owners have a license, they should be paying hotel tax and be subject to health and safety inspections.

As far as I can tell, none of this is happening.

While the Canadian dollar is low and tourism is booming, owners of legitimate hotels and bed and breakfasts are less inclined to complain.

And then there is what happened in San Francisco last year. When the authorities went after Airbnb over unpaid taxes, it coughed up $12 million. But when citizens and some city councillors introduced a bill (Proposition F) during the last election to limit Airbnb and its ilk because of what they were doing to available rental housing and communities, Airbnb launched an $8-million campaign (against their opposition’s half million dollar effort) and won 55 per cent of the vote.

Meanwhile, as I write this, in Vancouver the Vision-led council continues to turn a blind eye.

© 2016 Vancouver Courier