Lucia Bennett, who lives in a home on a street with high-end businesses and is one of three seniors who call it home, is fed up.
“It’s been a good year,” Bennett said. “The market is really good in the area. I wouldn’t say the problem is that prices are skyrocketing, but you do know people are really, really upset. They’re being offered things like $10 million for a lot of these houses on the market.”
Bennett, who was originally from Toronto, said her family was paying $100,000 for the house she shares with her parents when it went for $180,000.
‘No one is coming to help us.’- Paul and Rosa Bennett. (CBC)
She says now she’s being asked to pay half to a third of the sale price to get a small piece of the big house.
“I live with my parents… my parents are making about $70,000 [a year]. In this one piece of real estate [where] no one is coming to help us,” she said.
“It’s really hard because we have a lot of financial stress. A very complicated situation.”
A Vancouver realtor who represents a number of older homes who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the feelings of younger buyers said families are just trying to make a decision and not be treated as ‘freaks.’
He said this is happening right across the city. A realtor from West Vancouver who sits on a number of B.C. home boards says he knows families have had similar experiences.
‘It’s become scary’
“In B.C., nobody is trying to run to Victoria,” he said. “It’s becoming scary now. What we’ve seen has reached a tipping point where it’s not a good environment, to put it mildly, for families.”
The median sale price in Metro Vancouver increased 23.6 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2015. (Chart of Median Home Sales Growth by Month, 2015-16)
While he doesn’t know who is being hurt the most, he said they’re being asked to accept a lower price for their home by using a house that is not on the list of what has been on the market for the last five years. He worries that is pushing families to sell earlier in an effort to protect the bottom line of