THE UPSIZER

Jason Levine Lawyer, 51

THE STRATEGY: Move into a larger home while prices are down

THE THINKING: Jason Levine bought his first house off Commercial Drive in 2001 and later invested in several rental properties. Then, four years ago, he sold the rentals and moved into a detached house on a small lot in Mount Pleasant. But the need for more space for his growing family, along with dropping home prices, spurred him to buy a larger home on a full lot with a laneway house.

“Because of the drop in prices, the spread between my house, which is on a 25-foot lot, and one on a 33-foot lot went down from about $500,000 to about $200,000, so for me the dip has been good,” says Levine, on the phone a day before signing off on the new place. The Vancouver lawyer is hopeful that, barring some kind of economic catastrophe, house prices won’t fall drastically; still, he watches the market with a hint of trepidation.

“Everybody’s got so much riding on the market if they own property, and if they don’t, they have even more riding on prices going down so they can get in,” he says. “So I think everybody watches it very carefully.”

THE EXPERT: According to Tsur Somerville, senior fellow at the UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, upsizers are some of the biggest winners in the current real estate climate because pricier detached homes have fallen sharply in value while condos, townhomes and some houses have remained relatively steady. As a result the gap in prices has narrowed, in some areas quite drastically; still, that doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing.

“The problem for them is that in a down market you get very, very slow transactions, and they can easily end up in a situation where they’re squeezed between selling and buying,” says Somerville, referring to the fact that detached homes are often taking months to sell. “The ‘buy but then can’t sell’ tends to be the bigger issue, but the other way around, it’s, ‘Oh my god, where do I live?’” explains Somerville.