VANCOUVER—New numbers to be released Thursday by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) show buying a home in Vancouver is getting easier — if you happen to have more than a million dollars budgeted for the purpose.

Typically, demand for high-end homes has played the biggest role in price increases within the housing market, explained CMHC market analyst Keith Stewart in an interview.

“For sure that was the case following the financial crisis,” he said.

Not so, anymore. The segment of the housing market that is leading price increases consists of homes priced up to, but not exceeding, $1 million.

By the end of March 2018, the proportion of Metro Vancouver’s housing inventory priced above $1 million far exceeded sales of homes in that price range, while the reverse was true for homes priced less than $1 million.

That means, for example, that someone looking for a home with a budget between $2–3 million by the end of March 2018 had 16 per cent of Vancouver’s housing inventory available to them, while only 4 per cent of sales in that month were of homes in that price range.

But, a home seeker with a budget between $700,000–$1 million in the same month had just over 15 per cent housing inventory within their budget, while 24 per cent of the sales that month were of homes in that price range.

The latter buyer, in other words, faced much greater competition for their prospective purchase.

That rings true for Metro Vancouver home seekers. Heather Patel, an administrative assistant who was looking at the possibility of buying a home with her husband, an engineer, in March, said they were told by a financial adviser they could afford a home worth $500,000 with their two incomes.

But Patel knows that budget is not likely to go far in the city, or even in broader Metro Vancouver. “If we ever own, it will be outside the city,” she said.

“We’ve thought about jumping ship — even to the states,” she said, but the desire to stay close to family has kept them renting in south Burnaby.

In 2018, in the case of homes for sale under the $1 million mark, “you still have a chance of multiple offers and possibly a bidding war,” Stewart said.

That marks a change within Metro Vancouver’s housing market. Under 14 per cent of all the housing inventory in March 2014 was priced above $1 million. Four years later, that number is 45 per cent.

A number of possible factors have contributed to this shift, Stewart said, including government policies intended to cool the real estate market, such as the mortgage stress test brought in by the federal government and B.C.’s 2016 property transfer tax on foreign nationals.

Those measures seem to have eased the market for high-end homes, while the market for less expensive condominiums boomed as an option for both investment and prospective owner-occupiers.

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“There’s a record amount of apartments under construction right now,” said Leonard Catling, a spokesperson for the CMHC.

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation will release their quarterly housing market assessment Thursday.

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter covering wealth and work. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen

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