Keeping it Real

Ep. 30 Is West Van David Eby's Problem Child?

• Jacquie McCarnan • Season 1 • Episode 30

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Curious about how the recent Bank of Canada interest rate drop is shaking up the North Vancouver real estate market? Buckle up as we dissect the listing and offer statistics from early July to the end of the month, revealing a surprising seasonal dip despite the financial shift. We'll dive into the specifics of detached homes versus attached homes like condos, townhomes, and duplexes, giving you a clear picture of whether the market is truly cooling off or if something else is at play.

Next, gear up for a heated discussion on the zoning battle brewing between the District of West Vancouver and the provincial government. We'll unpack the contentious Bill 44, which aims to transform single-family lots into multi-family units, and the local backlash against what many see as an overstep by the province. Discover the arguments from both sides and the implications for housing development and prices in West Van and North Van. This episode is packed with insights and controversies that you won't want to miss!

See all 10 "problem children" here: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2023HOUS0123-001505

Bill 44: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/local-governments-and-housing/housing-initiatives/smale-scale-multi-unit-housing

West Van Council website re Bill 44: https://westvancouver.ca/business-development/housing/small-scale-multi-unit-housing-bill-44

Some quotes from council memebers: https://www.nsnews.com/local-news/west-vancouver-council-rejects-provincial-housing-rules-8896924

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, welcome back to Keeping it Real, the Vancouver and area residential real estate podcast that aims to cut through all the malarkey that you hear around. No, I'm going to stop saying water cooler, because honestly, everybody has their own water bottle now. Nobody goes to a water cooler since COVID. My name is Jackie McCarnan and I am your host for Keeping it Real. I'm a North Shore residential realtor who dabbles a little bit in commercial and commercial leasing Basically do it all Lately. I think I'm also a fairly prolific professional marketing manager, certainly with the podcast and the High Five Friday newsletter that all my peeps get. Everybody seems to like it and I'm getting some wonderful feedback. So if you are interested in receiving the newsletter that has extra info in addition to the podcast, just drop me a quick note and I will add you to the list. Easy to do.

Speaker 1:

This week's episode is a two-parter. I want to talk a little bit about the effect that the interest rate drop on the 24th of July had on real estate in North Vancouver, and then I'm going to talk to you about the battle that is currently waging between the District of West Vancouver and the provincial government, and it's going to be juicy. I'm going to throw in my disclaimer here that everything you hear on this podcast is my research coupled with my experience and my opinion. I'm not going to get everything right and if I get it wrong, let me know. I'm more than happy to make adjustments. But for the most part, the research that I'm doing is pretty deep. For the most part, the research that I'm doing is pretty deep and I hope that I'm able to present you with enough information that you can make informed decisions about the market and what's happening on the North Shore. Also, if you didn't listen to last week's episode about the French guy that got bamboozled by the old lady, I think that you will really want to go back and listen to that one, because it was really fun to create and it's a great story. So, without further ado, here's Keeping it Real, alrighty.

Speaker 1:

So in Canada, the Bank of Canada dropped their interest rates by 0.25% on the 24th of July 2024. And I think a whole lot of people would think, oh my gosh, a drop in interest rates is going to mean a whole lot more activity in the real estate market. So I thought, well, let's find out. So I did a bit of digging. For those of you that don't know. Realtors have access to the back office of the MLS, so we are able to look up statistics in a million different ways and if you go back and listen to my episode on stats, you can hear that those statistics can be interpreted also in a million different ways.

Speaker 1:

But what I did was I went back and I took one week out of July before the interest rate drops and I looked at how many new listings we had for detached homes and for attached homes and then how many accepted offers. So between July 1 and July 7, there were 32 new listings for detached homes. And I'm just going to add a little bit in here when I say new listings, sometimes it's an old listing that's been taken off the market and relisted. But for the purposes of this exercise, 32 homes were listed for sale between July 1st and July 7th of 2024 in North Vancouver and 11 homes received accepted offers. Probably not those same homes, but 11 homes got accepted offers. Okay, so that's not bad. There were 39 attached homes. So condos, townhomes and duplexes, 39 new detached home listings, duplexes, 39 new detached home listings and 19 got offers. So that's pretty good. That's a seller's market. There's lots of activity there Moving, moving, moving, despite the fact that if you had asked anybody at that time if the market was moving, they probably would have said no. So I did the same thing for July 24th to July 31st. So from the date of the interest rate drops until yesterday because I'm recording this on the 1st of August and between July 24th and July 31st, there were similar number of listings 37 listings for detached homes, but only two accepted offers, and for detached homes there were 20 listings, which is about half of before, and one accepted offer.

Speaker 1:

Now, really, what we can use to explain this is that the market slows down quite a lot in the summer. Historically is just a dip in the buying activity, because the people who buy homes are generally, you know, out of town or hanging out with the kids or trying to do something more fun than shop for a home. Probably that's what happened. I'm going to do this exercise again in a couple of weeks just to see what's going on. But I think we you know everybody is anticipating that there are going to be more interest rate drops, which is going to probably cause buyers maybe to wait, take a variable rate mortgage and then have the uh, have the mortgage payment drop when you are uh, uh, if, if the rates drop, that might be the smarter move, but you would have to talk to a mortgage broker to make sure that that's the right move for you. Um, I do not really talk about mortgages, or what kind of mortgage is right for you. Uh, it's not my thing. What is my thing is researching battles between municipal government and the province, and this one's fun. So, uh, buckle up.

Speaker 1:

I titled this podcast what the Heck is Happening in West Van Because West Van is making a bit of a name for themselves with regard to the new provincial legislation, and if you don't know what the new provincial legislation is about, either you haven't been listening to my podcast or you just don't take a big interest in real estate, because it's everywhere. So, just in a nutshell, the province, under David Eby, decided that they were going to allow for a whole lot of infill housing and they're going to change the zoning from single-family to allow for multiple multi-family units on single family lots. And the big thing about that is that you could get that zoning without put up to four homes on it, depending on the size, and up to six homes if it's within a transit-oriented area, which is within a specific number of meters away from a transit hub and go back and listen to the old episode about that, because it's much more specific than that, but I just wanted to give you a just a quick reminder. So back in December 2023, when the province decided that they were going to do this new, all these new housing initiatives they identified 10 municipalities that were not. They were underperforming for density. One of those was West Vancouver and the province said that within the next five years from the time that they pulled the trigger on the new legislation, that West Vancouver would need to build 1,432 new housing units. If you want to look that up, that is under the Housing Supply Act of British Columbia and I will put a link in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

Essentially, the province is saying hey look, west Van and North Van too, by the way, the District of North Van was also included in that list of top 10 problem child children. The province is saying you guys aren't really doing your part. We have a whole lot of density here. We have a lot more density coming. The fact that we have more people than we have places for them to live means that prices go up. So you need to build more housing, or you need to figure out a way to increase your density so that we can put people in those places and not have competition for the few places that are available, because, obviously, obviously, competition makes the prices go up. And I'll hearken you back to a time when, um, maybe like 2019, when people were applying to uh get apartments and they would practically bribe the uh, the landlord to get a get into the apartment and things are going for higher than they were advertised and it was just a nasty for lack of a better word shit show.

Speaker 1:

Very quickly in the process, places like West Van and North Van started having public meetings for people to inform them on what the new changes would be like, and the district of West Van, of course, was no different, and they had a ton of public meetings which, you can imagine, were fairly well attended by the residents of West Vancouver, and this sentiment was not in favor of the province. As you can imagine, a lot of the residents who showed up to those meetings were quite annoyed by the idea of the province dictating what can be done in West Vancouver, and so, despite the fact that this was not a request from the province to the municipalities to change zoning. The district rejected the proposal to change zoning, which so I don't even know what to what to say about that. Really, if everybody in the province, if all the municipalities in the province, are given the same mandate and the same directive, then why is pointed out by a council member that the most of the single family lots in West Vancouver already allow for secondary suites and coach houses, so they should be exempt from this. But that left something like 220 properties that were not going to get rezoned, and so I think for the people who own those properties, maybe they want them rezoned, who knows, right. But the point is that the District of West Vancouver said no, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 1:

This is probably a really good time to give a little primer on how land ownership works in Canada. So all land in Canada is crown land, everything is crown land, and anybody who owns property here and I'm making quotes with my fingers when I say the word owns has a fee, simple ownership of the land. So title is given to or purchased, I guess by title, is purchased by somebody who is buying land, and that title confers some rights to the title holder, so it allows the title holder to sell or lease, mortgage or bequeath or otherwise dispose of the land that they own the title on. So no one owns land. They own the title to the land. The government, the crown, retains certain rights to that land, including zoning bylaws, restrictive covenants. So if you have hydro running through your backyard, that's a restricted covenant and you can't do it right of way. You can't do anything about that. You can't do it right of way, you can't do anything about that. They retain the right to collect property taxes and there are other rights, such as subsurface resources, which I'm not even going to look it up. I don't know what it means. I'm sure that somebody can tell me, but it's kind of moot with regard to this particular conversation. With regard to this particular conversation, and I think it goes without saying that even though our land is considered crown land, it's actually indigenous land and it never belonged to any of the crown in the first place. But this is where we're at in this moment of time and I'm not here to debate whether all land should go back to indigenous communities. I don't, I don't even know, but I For now, this is how land ownership works in Canada you buy title, you don't buy land. So back to the issue of West Van versus the province. What's going to happen?

Speaker 1:

Things have gotten fairly heated with debates in West Vancouver. Some council members have even said things like it's not West Van's fault that the federal government has allowed a million people to immigrate to Canada, thus exploding our need for housing. Personally, I don't think that that's the issue. I think the bigger issue is that the federal government got out of housing starts in the 80s and has have left us with grossly inadequate housing. But um, they're pretty vocal about it over there in the west van council to the point where people are calling it communism or socialism, and I'm not sure that those people actually understand how land ownership works, because you own the title, you don't own the land, so, and the municipality doesn't own anything.

Speaker 1:

And just to be clear, the vote to reject the new zoning was unanimous. Not one council member in West Vancouver felt that the rezoning mandate from the province was legit and they voted unanimously to reject it. When the big arguments started happening and people wondered what would happen after June 30th, the province said they can override the municipality and issue a ministerial override to enable the density and apply basic site standards such as setbacks, height requirements and lot coverage, and the statement at that time was that they would do so. I really just want to reiterate this thing about private property. So one of the quotes says they, the province, are treating private property as though it was their own and moving at a reckless pace as they paint a broad brushstroke across the province. Again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what property means in Canada. As of last week, the District of West Vancouver had not adopted the new provincial guidelines it's called Bill 44, by the way, I should have added that and so last week they were issued a notice to comply by, and within 30 days are given 30 days notice to comply with the Bill 44 requirements. So I guess that means we're going to know at the end of August what happens. Almost all the other something like 168 out of 188 communities in the province have already complied, and there are several that have applied for extensions. Some extensions were granted due to wildfires, some granted due to other circumstances, and I think the district of West Van has now applied for an extension. The West Van extension request was put in after they were issued this 30-day requirement and they're saying that they need more time now because a whole bunch of their people are on vacation.

Speaker 1:

Sure, part of the problem, I think, for West Van is that this actually comes down to optics. So West Vancouver has long been considered one of Canada's most beautiful prime neighborhoods to live. It's gorgeous. There are lots of large, very large homes here. It's extremely exclusive, made so more by the fact that it's now unaffordable, but also by the fact that there isn't a lot of diversity in the housing options. So there aren't apartments up in the British properties. So people who can only afford apartments can't live in the British properties. So people who can only afford apartments can't live in the British properties, which means that the people who live there are, you know, very, very wealthy. And so from an optics perspective, this kind of looks bad. It looks like the wealthy portion of the community are saying we don't want any of this in our backyard. It really it just looks bad. And I think asking for an extension after you said to the province that you're not going to do what they asked is kind of also the optics on that looks pretty bad as well.

Speaker 1:

There I have no opinion one way or the other. I, you know, I can understand why people would want things to stay the same. Everybody likes things to stay the same, but from a perspective of the general population, I'm not sure that things can stay the same and I think holding on to the old attitude that this is my house and I want it to be exactly like this for the next 50 years is pretty naive. I know that people are going to have strong opinions on this subject and I really want to hear them. If you are a West Van resident that feels that the province is completely overstepping, let me know. Send me a text or an email, or you can DM me on Instagram, whatever way you want to. It's easy to find my email through the website North Van Home Sales. I just really want to know what everyone has to say about this and you know, keep it kind, please, because we can all have different opinions. We don't have to yell at each other about them.

Speaker 1:

Having said that, ultimately, the District of West Vancouver will be forced to comply with the province's Bill 44. It's just how it works. The province can mandate what people can do with their property. It's part of the rights retained through the title system land titles. It's almost a moot point and it's probably just wasting time, wasting government resources to refuse to do that. That's. That's where I excuse me, where I would take issue with it, but I mean, I don't know. Again, love to hear what you have to say.

Speaker 1:

Over the last 29 this is the 30th episode I've often, uh, done a shout out to a local business. I've kind of run out of local businesses. I don't know that I go to more than 30 local businesses on the North Shore. So if you have somebody that you would think deserves a shout out on the Keeping it Real podcast, please let me know, send me an email or, you know, just send me their info on North Van Home Sales on Instagram. That would be very cool. And I usually like to add in a little bit about what I've been watching.

Speaker 1:

And, of course, this is August 1st 2024. So what I'm watching are the Olympics, of course, and it's great to see Canada represented strongly in the Olympic Games. We're not doing great, but then I don't know, and it's great to see Canada represented strongly in the Olympic Games, we're not doing great, but then I don't know, we usually kind of pick it up a little bit more toward the end. Anyway, what I'm most impressed with is the Canadian women's soccer team, who have weathered a huge amount of controversy this year and have continued winning soccer games despite what must be incredibly stressful for them over there in Paris Actually, they're probably not even in Paris, I think they're in Nice but it must be very difficult for them. So go Canada. I'm excited to see how you do in the Olympics, and I've always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, as you loyal listeners know.

Speaker 1:

You can get keeping it real on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or you could head over to my website, northvanhomesalescom slash podcasts and pick up all of the episodes there. You can also access information, lots of information, including my buyers and sellers guides, which I have updated to include buying or selling tenanted properties. So there's a little bit in each one of those now about what it's like to buy or sell a tenanted property under the new landlord no wait residential tenancy act. There you go. I hope you have a wonderful long weekend, august long weekend, and I will see you guys here next week.

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Jacquie McCarnan

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