'Empty Condo' Phenomenon a Myth
Via: Beyond Robson
If you've seen the film Everything's Gone Green you know what the 'empty condo' phenomenon is. Wealthy, overseas buyers snap up Vancouver condos, only to let them sit vacant for years. An entire city of tall buildings sitting virtually empty.
Well, a new study from BTAworks, a research and development division of Bing Thom Architects, suggests that it's just a big urban myth.
You can find the full study in schwanky pdf format here.
Some interesting notes:
BTAworks...examined data from the City of Vancouver, BC Assessment, BC Hydro, and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation for 2,400 condos in Downtown Vancouver - almost 10 percent of all the condos in the area.
Only 5.5 to 8 percent of study condos were unoccupied.
Condo ownership is a relatively new form of housing for Vancouver. Over 88 percent of condo units in Downtown Vancouver have been built since 1990.
Less than 40 percent of downtown condos have more than one bedroom.
The majority of condos are not occupied by the property owner.
The majority of non-owner occupied condos are owned by BC residents, with a scattering of foreign owners, predominately from the western US states such as California, Washington, and Arizona.
Owner-occupied units are typically worth $30,000 to $40,000 more than non-owner occupied units, and the more bedrooms the unit has, the more likely it is to be owner occupied.
A family with one child in the City of Vancouver earning the median income of $75,000 a year would have great difficulty in finding and paying for a condo bigger than one bedroom, even if condo prices were to fall 25 percent below 2008 assessment levels.
While much of the study provides what I like to term 'duh' statistics, it is interesting not so much that the empty condo myth has been falsified to some extent, but rather, why it began in the first place. Did China's takeover of Hong-Kong and the subsequent exodus prompt mass racism/classism in the form of such urban myths? I really have no idea, but check out the study and post all your problems with it below.