Passionate about passion projects
Another month, another recordhigh single-family home-selling price in Kelowna.
Just-released June figures from the Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board pegs the average selling price off a single-family home at $716,500.
That’s up from $704,000 in May, the first time the average broke the $700,000 barrier, and a whopping 17 per cent spike from the $612,400 average in June 2016.
“Those wanting to capitalize on a seller’s market need to price carefully so as to not miss out,” said board president and Coldwell Banker realtor Tanis Read.
“We are generally quite busy this time of year and, with continued upward pressure on the market to to a lack of inventory, sales activity is brisk.”
Besides a shortage of homes driving up prices and fueling demand, there are other factors at play.
Kelowna’s economy is booming and workers are moving here and buying, people already here are feeling flush and buying for the first time or selling their existing homes and buying bigger and better.
Plus, there’s the Vancouver effect.
The average selling price of single-family home in the West Coast city is $1.8 million.
People can sell their home there, buy a comparable house in Kelowna for less than half that and have money left over to retire, semi-retire or start a business.
Gopal was born in Fiji, where he had to drop out of school at 11 because his parents couldn’t afford the tuition.
He started work at a grocery store where he soon implemented more cost-effective ways of running the business. His boss was impressed and financed Gopal’s education.
Gopal moved to Canada in 1977 to start one of Kelowna’s first tech firms a year later.
Vadim makes software for local governments.
Since then he’s also invested in and mentored other tech innovators, been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Okanagan College and won Kelowna’s Man of the Year.