The heavily discounted sale of a French-inspired villa may be the best deal in Vancouver in 2020.
That’s according to Adam Major, managing broker with Holywell Properties, a real-estate company that also runs Zealty.ca, an online property-information site.
When asked by the Straight to name the most interesting transaction in the city for the year 2020, Major pointed to 3688 East Boulevard.
The listing details of the property located in the tony neighbourhood of Shaughnessy were tracked by Zealty.ca.
The mansion was listed on January 23, 2017 for $17,388,000. The price was reduced to $14,880,000. It did not sell, and the listing expired July 29 of that year.
The property came on the market again on August 1, 2017, with a price of $14,880,000. The listing by Macdonald Realty – Manyee Lui expired on January 1, 2018.
A week later, on January 9, 2018, the same agent listed the property again, this time for $14,689,000. It spent nearly a year on the market without getting sold. On January 1, 2019, the listing expired.
After two days, on Junary 3, 2019, Macdonald Realty – Manyee Lui listed the property once more. The price was reduced to $13,980,000.
Finally, on February 20, 2020, the villa sold for $7 million.
Major noted that the sale price of the 3688 East Boulevard property represents a nearly 60 percent discount from its original 2017 list price of $17.3 million.
As well, the buyer offered and paid a $30,000 bonus commission to the buyer’s agent, Multiple Realty Ltd.
“The seller end up with a fair bit less,” Major told the Straight.
Inside the luxurious home at 3688 East Boulevard.
There’s more to the story.
The mansion also sold below its assessed value.
Major noted that the 2020 B.C. Assessment value of the two-story-plus-basement home totalled $9,370,000.
“So at $7 million, it also sold for a 25 percent discount to assessed value,” Major explained.
According to the Holywell Properties managing broker, this was one of the lowest sale-price-to-assessed-value ratios in 2020.
The home has five bedrooms and eight baths. Luxury features include manicured gardens and a golf putting green.
As for Zealty.ca, Major said that the site had over two million visits last year.
Also, his company made enhancements for the real-estate-information portal in 2020.
These include adding bonus commissions for buyer’s agents, expired listings, daily sales, information of live-stream open houses, and others.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
