Heritage home spurs bidding war amid pandemic real estate slump
Character house on East Pender sells for $340,000 above asking price
Real estate listings, and sales, have plunged during the pandemic. But some properties are still selling.
Realtor David Richardson recently listed a heritage home at 2120 East Pender for $1.588 million. Open houses have been nixed during the crisis, so his office set up private viewings by appointment on April 25 and 26.
So many people wanted to see it they had to extend the viewings for two days. They received 14 offers, and the buzz in the real estate industry is that the house sold for $1.928 million, $340,000 above the asking price.
Richardson wouldn’t confirm the price because the deal hasn’t closed yet. But he said there was a lot of action.
He said his office sent out 8,000 flyers for the listing, noting it was by appointment only. “We lined them up every 20 minutes, and it took four days to show 75 people.”
The house was built in 1906, when its Grandview neighbourhood was vying to be one of Vancouver’s elite areas.
It’s big (four bedrooms, 2,500 square feet) and is brimming with character, with a turret on the outside, big open spaces on the main floor and lots of old-growth wood and stained glass. It’s also on a large lot, 50 by 66 feet.
In short, it’s the kind of home you might find in parts of Kitsilano or the West End.
But you’d have to pay much more for a house like this on the west side, so Richardson said many of the people looking were west siders looking east.
“There’s a 20 per cent price difference (between the west and east sides),” said Richardson, who usually sells west side properties.
“On a $2-million house, that’s $400,000.”
Richardson thinks one of the reasons the house attracted so much attention was a lack of listings during the pandemic.
“Normally a guy like me carries 12 to 15 listings at this time of year. I’m carrying one or two, and they’re being snapped up right away.”
Realtor Les Twarog said things have been slow.
“The real estate board normally has 120 sales a day, and we’re doing about 40 or 50 sales a day,” he said.
But things are starting to pick up: Twarog has listed eight properties in the last couple of weeks.
“I listed a property on Kingsway and Boundary, $350,000, and I got eight calls in two days on it,” said Twarog.
“I have another property I listed in Victoria yesterday at five o’clock, and I got 15 calls. The price is $500,000.”
Twarog said the two key factors in selling seem to be “a lack of inventory and the price point.”
“Things are happening, but most sales are under $1.2 million,” he said. “Five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred thousand, those are the hot price points.”