Home search: Best to move across the water
Couple makes the “easy decision” to cash out of the heated local market and relocate to Victoria
Jessica Hartley has left Vancouver for her perfect house.
“I’m 32, and I think I’ve bought my dream home already,” Hartley told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
Last month, she and her husband, Sean, moved into their brand-new residence in Victoria. It’s a detached house with four bedrooms, three baths, and a big garden.
According to her, it happened because of two things. One is that they bought a Vancouver property five years ago. Two, her husband got a nice job offer.
Their story goes back to when the couple were about to get married. They had been renting together for two years at that time.
“We wanted a home, and we’d been renting and we just felt we just didn’t want to put our money into renting anymore,” Hartley said.
In 2012, they bought a two-bedroom apartment on Main Street, where they had planned to stay for a few years while they had their first child.
Her husband was born and raised in Vancouver, and he never wanted to leave. Staying in the city would have meant the couple could only hope to buy a townhouse if they were to have more kids and move up the property ladder later.
But then an offer came for her husband to work in Victoria; according to Hartley, their Vancouver condo at that time had appreciated by 80 percent.
“It was a pretty easy decision,” she said. They sold their apartment and used the money to buy a single-family house in Victoria.
Her husband started his new job on April 1, and Hartley, who was then working on contract with UBC, followed soon after.
“I moved without getting a job, but it was just too good of an opportunity,” she said.
Hartley recalled that although she and her husband took a risk with a mortgage on their first home in Vancouver, they’re glad they did.
“We would have been paying more for a townhouse [in Vancouver] than what we’re paying right now,” she said.
Compared to Vancouver, homes are more affordable in Victoria.
Based on a report by the Victoria Real Estate Board, the benchmark price for a detached property in the Greater Victoria area was $663,500 as of April this year. The price for similar properties in the city of Victoria proper was higher, $805,100.
In areas covered by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, which stretch from Maple Ridge to Whistler, the benchmark price for a detached house was $1.5 million for the same period. On the west side of Vancouver, it was $3.4 million.
According to a report issued on April 26 this year by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the housing market in Vancouver continues to “show strong evidence of problematic conditions”.
The agency defines “problematic conditions” as imbalances in the housing market that happen when “overbuilding, overvaluation, overheating and price acceleration—or combinations thereof—depart significantly from historical averages”.
However, an economic analysis released on May 3 by the Vancouverbased Central 1 Credit Union noted that housing markets in B.C. have “proven more resilient than expected”.
Although the median resale price in the province is expected to decrease by 2.2 percent in 2017, the paper projects increases of 5.5 percent and 3.1 percent for 2018 and 2019, respectively.
“Housing price momentum will remain positive through the forecast period due in large part to a collapse in inventory over the past year, with expected gains driven by the Vancouver Island and Kelowna regions this year, before being led again by Metro Vancouver thereafter,” according to Credit 1’s housing outlook for 2017–2019.
Hartley and her husband have no kids yet, but she feels more secure now, saying they have a good place to raise a family.
“I feel pretty safe with what we’ve got,” she said.
Citing her own experience, Hartley suggested that it’s always a good move for prospective home purchasers to invest in Vancouver.
“It’s harder now, obviously, because of higher prices,” she said. “But… if you could get into the Vancouver market, I think you can have a huge leg up if you ever move out.”
An apartment that seemed to be a find turned into a nightmare for a tenant when her building manager became overly familiar and wouldn’t leave her alone.
ment with the door closed behind me. After a while, I told him that I had to go because I had work in the morning, and he begged me not to leave. He’d been steadily drinking all evening.
“His kitchen had a dimmer light switch, and I mentioned in passing while I was there that I thought it was cool. He said, ‘I could do that for you if you want—it’s super easy. I could come down anytime and do it.’ I told him that I didn’t need it, but he said that it wasn’t a problem. Within days he showed up at my apartment at 10 o’clock at night with a bottle of wine, apparently to attach the switch.
“After he’d installed it, he wanted a hug goodbye. When I did, he rubbed his boner against my leg. He said, ‘Oh, I can’t help it.’
“I told him that he needed to leave. I didn’t want to make it about him, so I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go to work in the morning; it’s past my bedtime. You have to go.’ He said that he would see me tomorrow. I felt like I couldn’t escape from him because we lived in the same building.
“I went back to the Maritimes for Christmas and had some time to think. He was texting me repeatedly, even though I was ignoring it. I finally listened to my gut and I sent a message to tell him that we shouldn’t be friends because he was taking it too far. We couldn’t walk our dogs together anymore, and he shouldn’t come down to my apartment. I said that he had made me really uncomfortable in the time that I had known him and that—as his behaviour had proved—being friends clearly wasn’t something that was possible for him.
“He apologized profusely multiple times and started begging. He acted like I was breaking off a relationship, saying that |he could change. Then he got angry. The last text just said, ‘Fuck you.’ After that, it was all downhill from there.
“There was the fallout I anticipated since the day I moved in. Whenever the building manager would see me in the hallways, he would belittle me. He would have his dog and say, ‘Come on, buddy, don’t look at her. She’s fucking crazy. Bitch. Don’t look at her.’ I’ve never seen him treat anyone else that way. I have friends in the building and they say that he’s really nice to them and they don’t have any problems at all. It’s definitely targeted abuse at me, and very passiveaggressive—just because I didn’t want to sleep with him.
“One afternoon, I could hear him showing around people for an apartment that had just opened up. The majority of them were young women. One of the first questions that he would ask would be about who was moving in—and whether they had a boyfriend. I just wanted to yell out ‘Run.’
“I know I need to leave the situation—but I can’t afford to go anywhere else. I hope that people understand that this is a real issue, and it’s not just a one-off for building managers and landlords to abuse their power—especially in a city where rent is so high and apartments are hard to come by.”