Downtown Vancouver One Bedroom Prices Chart – Feb 28 2019

In this update, I decided to data mine all the individual sold and asking price data on the MLS for the last 2 years. I wanted to see where downtown Vancouver 1 bedroom prices are, compared to what the media is telling me. I decided to stick with 1 bedrooms since they are the most commonly requested listings by my clients. I listed below how I decided to filter the data for this analysis:

Buildings built between 1995 and 2015

1 bedroom units only

Greater than 500 square feet

Downtown peninsula only, my cutoff was a couple blocks west of Main st.

Quarterly Intervals

So as you can see, it looks like we peaked in early 2018 and prices right now are where they were in spring of 2017. That being said, each building is unique and sometimes certain buildings can buck the overall trend for whatever reason. However, on average prices for 1 bedroom condos in downtown Vancouver are selling for roughly what they were going for in spring of 2017. I decided to run the same analysis using median and prices per sq foot and the chart results were pretty much the same. The green bump you see at the end are the current asking prices for all the units for sale today. No… prices have not gone up, more on that below…

Another interesting outcome was the asking prices compared to the selling prices. It seems most owners are a bit out of touch with the current reality hoping for prices they would have gotten at the peak of the market in early 2018. It also shows that buyers will not make an offer until their asking price is more in line with recently sold listings. This is evident in the tight spread between average sold price and average asking price. There is a bit of bias however, in that quite frequently condo listings start at a high asking price and eventually they drop the asking until its inline with what the market will pay. So, in the chart above, only the last recorded asking price is taken into account. In the last couple of quarters, the average selling price was about 3% below the last asking price. Right now condo owners are asking about 11% more than their units are currently worth (on average).

Feel free to comment below.