The bubble may have already burst in Vancouver’s once frenzied real estate market, but that hasn’t stopped eager buyers from camping outside a new condo project downtown.
The tents went up on Thursday outside a development at Homer and Helmcken streets and by Friday afternoon, 25 people had set up camp for the night.
While the overheated Vancouver real estate market of yesteryear once made makeshift condo camps a common sight, these buyers are instead lured by the promise of significantly discounted prices.
The seller is promising discounts of up to 40 per cent.
Michael Wilcox, 27, has been camped outside since Thursday afternoon.
“We just thought the value was there,” said Wilcox, who was fifth in line for a sale not scheduled to start until Saturday afternoon.
Wilcox, a realtor himself, said he was eyeing a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 900-sq-ft property priced under $450,000. A comparable unit, he said, had previously been priced at around the $600,000 mark.
The building, originally developed by Chandler Development, went into receivership in late 2007, leaving financial advisory firm, the Bowra Group, to finish the project.
While most of the units had been pre-sold up to two years ago, there are still 44 units on offer, including several in which buyers didn’t follow through on the original sales.
Bowra president David Bowra says the sale was dictated by the current market conditions.
“Time is money,” Bowra said. “The market is tight right now. We’re trying to price them so they will move.”
It won’t be the first time this year that new condo projects have been advertised at discounted prices. The Onni Group, a prominent Lower Mainland developer, is in the middle of what it’s calling a “liquidation sale,” with prices slashed on 375 units in various projects around the region.
“This is really in response to a market that has changed,” Chris Evans, Onni's executive vice-president, told 24 hours in January.
“No one would have expected the market to shift as it did, so this is reacting to the market.”
But while claims of deep discounting can be enticing, realtor Will Wertheim says buyers must do their research to figure out if they’re really getting a steal.
“I think people get really pulled in by the marketing claims of the 20 to 40 per cent, but then you really have to ask, 20 to 40 per cent off of what,” said Wertheim, a realtor with The Residential Group.
