Vancouver Sun / Richmond News, February 19, 2016
If you are a first-time buyer and you are buying an existing home, you are out of luck — you must still pay the transfer taxes on all sales over $475,000.
But if first-time buyers want to buy a newly built house, the thresholds to avoid paying the transfer tax have now been increased to $750,000 (for a full exemption) and $800,000 (partial exemption).
By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun, February 17, 2016
Will you benefit or take a financial hit from the changes to B.C.’s Property Transfer Tax that were announced in Tuesday’s budget?
If you are buying an existing home, you are out of luck — you must still pay the transfer taxes on all sales over $475,000.
But if you want to buy a newly built house, the thresholds to avoid paying the transfer tax have now been increased to $750,000 (for a full exemption) and $800,000 (partial exemption).
By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun, February 15, 2016
The finance minister has hinted Tuesday’s provincial budget will increase the tax-exempt threshold for first-time homebuyers, and at the same time create a new luxury tax for high-end homes.
Mike de Jong has said these changes would not just take effect in Metro Vancouver, where a housing affordability crisis is brewing, but right across B.C.
So, where would first-time homebuyers benefit the most,
Bethany Lindsay, Vancouver Sun, February 12, 2016
METRO VANCOUVER — For the average young family living in Metro Vancouver, price tags for detached homes have climbed so high that there is little hope of ever being able to afford one.
And the alternatives — condos or townhouses with enough bedrooms for the children — are hard to come by in this part of B.C. The Canadian National Occupancy Standard holds that three-bedroom homes are the best choice for couple with two children,
Kerry Gold, The Globe and Mail, Jan. 29, 2016
Rob Adamson typifies many average-income-earning homeowners who have cashed out of the Lower Mainland at an early age.
They are part of the drive behind a spike in sales for Victoria-area housing. The Greater Victoria market has seen a an overall increase of 21.7 per cent in detached-house sales in December, 2015, compared to December, 2014, according to the Victoria Real Estate Board.
Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver Sun, January 5, 2016
The average value of detached homes has broken through $1 million in more than 50 additional Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods, 2016 assessment figures show.
“It’s a little, depressed area,” Realtor Jason Weinman said of the Multiple Listing Service-defined zone of Lynnmour on the North Shore. There’s not much to this zone between the end of the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge and Capilano University,
Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun, January 4, 2016
Increases in property assessments pushed as many as 55,000 British Columbia homeowners over last year’s $1.1 million threshold for receiving the provincial homeowners grant on their property tax prompting a new call for the government to revise the program to cushion the impact of a hot real estate market.
BC Assessment on Monday released 2016 assessments for some two million properties and hot markets in the Metro Vancouver pushed residential assessed values to some of their biggest increases in more than 30 years,
Brent Jang, The Globe & Mail, Nov 10, 2015
Single-family detached houses are becoming an ever-shrinking portion of the total housing stock in the Vancouver region, adding to pricing pressures in an already hot market.
The share of detached houses as a percentage of all residential properties in the region has tumbled from 65 per cent in 2000 to 54 per cent last year, Central 1 Credit Union senior economist Bryan Yu said Tuesday.
Kerry Gold, The Globe & Mail, Nov 2, 2015
A new study that puts data behind the widely held but difficult-to-prove assumption that off-shore money is driving Vancouver’s superheated housing market has concluded the vast majority of houses on the city’s affluent west side have been bought by new immigrants from China, many of whom don’t earn their living here.
The data were obtained by David Eby, the NDP MLA for Vancouver-Point Grey.
Kerry Gold, The Globe and Mail, Oct. 24, 2015
Picture a map of the Lower Mainland and a growing wave moving outward from Vancouver, and you will get a general sense of increasing house prices.
The $1-million line used to divide the east side of the city from the west, and then it crept all the way to Burnaby. Now, it’s moving like a rapidly rising tide,