House Browsing Made Easier

Thanks to Real Estate Weekly, we can get a bird's eye view of the Lower Mainland's various housing markets. Those who faithfully follow this blog (don’t all raise your hands at once) are probably familiar with my regular rants about housing in Vancouver.

By Tony Wanless / October 28, 2011

Thanks to Real Estate Weekly, we can get a bird’s eye view of the Lower Mainland’s various housing markets.

Those who faithfully follow this blog (don’t all raise your hands at once) are probably familiar with my regular rants about housing in Vancouver.

Like how housing costs should be one-third of your household income, but in Vancouver it’s over 90 per cent of average household income, which surely means that this price merry-go-round has to stop eventually.

It also means that there are two markets in the Vancouver area. The first serves the “wealth” buyers, who can buy outright. The second serves the “income” buyers, those ordinary folks who have to submit in servitude to a mortgage (probably forever).

After all, people have to live somewhere, and not everybody is of the buy it/flip it/buy another one variety. Most people are caught in the same position: they hate the market, but they have to…um…live with it.

So, it’s nice to see that one of the big impediments to that “living with it” is finally gone. I’m referring to the difficulty of gaining an overall view of the housing market in this region.

You know how it goes: every time you drive to some town in B.C., you make a stop at a local real estate office to check out the listings. You never know.

But you couldn’t do that in the Lower Mainland until now. If you lived in Surrey and were thinking you might want to check out the Sunshine Coast for a lifestyle change, you were basically out of luck unless you navigated to individual agents’ listings on the web.

Now you’re not.

REW.ca, the online arm of the Real Estate Weekly newspaper chain, has now become a portal site that connects home buyers and sellers of resale properties and new development homes. The site includes listings from all four local boards and associations, covering from Hope to Pemberton and the Sunshine Coast. There are also neighborhood profiles available so you can get a flavour of the places in which you might be interested.

I’m not advocating or promoting here – just recognizing that the market today has reduced many of us to being wannabe homeowners, or at least wannabe owners of a certain kind of home.

At least this might let us dream a little. And, who knows, you might get lucky and actually find one.