VANCOUVER—A series of house fires in the last 11 months have sparked a debate about the effects of property speculation in Vancouver, including a call from one political party to ban Airbnb altogether.

Public suspicion, seen on social media and elsewhere, is focused on five properties that each embody some element of Vancouver’s housing crisis. The fires happened in multimillion-dollar houses that were either under development; were sitting empty; were being rented on the short-term rental site Airbnb; or had multiple, high-interest mortgages from unconventional lenders.

Two of the homes were for sale at the time they caught fire, and all but one of the fires have been deemed suspicious by Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services.

“The trend is obvious: Buildings or houses that are primarily empty, often recently purchased, often back up for sale, tend to have fires, and it’s been happening often in our city,” said Jasper Wright, a Kitsilano resident who lives with his wife and two young children just a block away from the most recent fire, which happened at 1848 Macdonald St. on Aug. 23.

Citing that fire and four other examples, Wright said he has a real fear that a fire could spread to old, wooden homes that were built close together.

The fire department has since ruled that the fire at 1848 Macdonald was accidental.

As news broke about the 1848 Macdonald fire last month, several candidates from the ProVancouver party took to social media to call for an outright ban on Airbnb.

“Our houses, in this (frenzy) of land banking and investing, have become derelict properties, and the question is, is this now becoming a threat to the public?” David Chen, ProVancouver’s mayoral candidate, told StarMetro about a week after the fire.

Chen said he didn’t think he was being overly hasty in calling for a ban on short-term rentals based on the fire at 1848 Macdonald.

“You can’t make permanent policy about something that hasn’t been well-studied yet, but like anything else, if you sit there and do nothing, it’s like our housing situation: There are a lot of people screaming for things to be done now, and perhaps they could have been done proactively as the problem was unrolling itself,” he said.

In response to public speculation, the fire department said the number of suspicious fires is not especially high this year. While the fire department warned of a spike in empty home fires in 2016, stricter bylaws have largely worked and the number of empty home fires fell in 2017 and 2018.

“These are high-profile fires, so that’s what people see,” said Ray Bryant, assistant chief of fire prevention for Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services (VFRS).

There is no indication that anything connects the five fires at the heart of public scrutiny, but a look at the ownership and history of each property does reveal different facets of Vancouver’s overheated real-estate market.

1848 Macdonald

This three-storey house at 3rd Ave. and Macdonald St. in Kitsilano was for sale when a fire started on Aug. 23. VFRS has determined the fire is not suspicious.

The house had been divided into three separate suites, and screengrabs posted by several Twitter users show it had been posted on Airbnb as a short-term rental, although the posting is no longer on the site. Vancouver-based data analyst Jens von Bergmann provided scraped Airbnb listing data to StarMetro, showing that information scraped from a listing near 3rd and Macdonald “match the title and other fields” in the screengrabs. The listings were last modified on Aug. 22 and 24.

At the time of the fire, the house was listed for sale for $2.58 million. It’s assessed at $2.4 million, and the property last changed hands in 2016, when it was bought for $2.25 million. Omar and Shelley Kassam are the owners of the property, according to land title records, which lists a property on Marine Dr. as their mailing address. They did not respond to requests for comment sent to their cosmetic dentistry practice in Yaletown.

In April, the City of Vancouver passed a new bylaw that allows short-term rental but requires people who list properties on sites like Airbnb to have a city-issued licence. To be rented for less than 30 days, the property must be the licence-holder’s primary residence.

Bryant said the fire department helped the city develop its policy around fire safety and short-term rentals.

“If there are separate sleeping areas that they are renting out, we wanted to make sure they had interconnecting smoke alarms and a means of egress out of that secondary suite and an egress plan posted on the door, much like you’d see in a hotel,” he said.

319 Prior St.

This property has a history of fires. The heritage house originally on this Strathcona lot burned down in 2008. The fire department ruled the fire not suspicious and said it was likely caused by old wiring, according to news reports at the time.

The city issued a permit to rebuild the home in 2014, but according to city staff, “work on this building progressed slowly and came to a halt in 2017.” The building permit expired in October 2017, according to the City of Vancouver, and city staff dealt with a number of complaints about the site being untidy and not secured properly. On May 31, 2018, the half-finished building caught on fire, destroying a neighbouring house and damaging other properties. That fire was deemed suspicious — as was a third fire on Aug. 1 that fed on the pile of rubble sitting on the two destroyed properties.

The city says that between the May 31 and Aug. 1 fires, the property changed hands, which added more delays to the city’s attempt to compel the owner to clean up the property. StarMetro has not been able to verify the current owner’s identity as the land title has yet to be updated. The property’s assessed value is $1.2 million.

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Properties that are empty because they are under development are vulnerable to break-ins and fire, Bryant said. But if property owners follow the fire department’s board-up standard — which includes five-inch plywood, four-inch nails and multi-headed screws that can’t be removed easily — it’s unlikely that thieves will be able to break in. New bylaws enacted in 2016 increase the fines for owners who fail to properly secure an empty property.

2250 Southwest Marine Dr.

This four-bedroom, four-bathroom house built in 1925 burned down on July 29, and the fire department has determined the fire was suspicious. The property is currently assessed at $4.66 million. It changed hands in March 2015, when it sold for $2.9 million; a year later, the property sold for almost double, at $4.2 million.

Naomi Wang, the realtor who listed the property, said she’s had to drop the price to $4.38 million and list the property as vacant land. The house was sitting empty at the time of the fire, she said, and the owners had paid Vancouver’s new empty homes tax on the property. That tax is applied on homes that are occupied for less than six months every year and is one per cent of assessed value — meaning the owners of 2250 Southwest Marine Dr. would have paid $46,600.

Wang said the fire has made it much more difficult to sell the property. The rapid slowdown in the Vancouver market, which has hit expensive properties on the city’s Westside particularly hard, isn’t helping.

2573 W. 3rd Ave.

This three-storey Kitsilano house burned down on Dec. 22, 2017. In August, news that the lot — complete with the charred remains of the house — was for sale for nearly $4 million quickly spread and was reported on first by local media and then by the BBC.

The house was owned by a numbered company but is now in foreclosure, realtor Hunter Tse told CTV. Tse said a developer could build a fourplex on the property. The property sold for $3 million in November 2016, and the property had multiple mortgages from smaller, unconventional lenders.

According to mortgage documents registered with B.C.’s Land Title and Survey office, the interest rates on some of those mortgages were very high: a mortgage for $2.2 million from Vancouver-based HYI Finance had a 10.5 per cent interest rate ($19,250 a month), and that rate was set to jump to 24 per cent ($44,000 a month) on Jan. 5, 2018. Another mortgage from Kismet Capital in the amount of $773,000 had a 15 per cent interest rate ($9,662 a month) that went up to 25 per cent ($16,401 a month) on Nov. 1, 2018. Two other mortgages are also listed on title records.

3737 Angus Dr.

This $14-million mansion in the heart of Vancouver’s historic Shaughnessy neighbourhood had a major fire on Oct. 22 that damaged the roof and interior. Fire inspectors quickly determined the fire had been set deliberately. The house is in Shaughnessy First, a neighbourhood with strict limitations on changing or demolishing the historic houses that are common in the area.

The house had sat empty for years, although it was briefly rented out to a group of artists in 2016, musician Maggie Blue told StarMetro at the time of the fire.

Maio Feng Pan and Wen Huan Yan own the property. In August, the City of Vancouver sued Pan in an attempt to compel him to repair the fire-damaged house, according to media reports. Just two weeks later, WorksafeBC halted work on the house, saying the structure was unsafe.

Arson is a very difficult crime to solve, said Bryant. Nearly a year after the 3737 Angus Dr. blaze, police have still not laid any charges.

“You pretty much need to see someone do it,” said Bryant.

Wright isn’t sure what more the city could do to prevent these kinds of fires. If houses are protected by heritage designation, he wants to see the kind of action the city took against the owners of 3737 Angus Dr., compelling people to rebuild heritage homes “so they can’t just build more square footage or benefit from the fire.”

Correction — Sept. 18, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that incorrectly stated that the owners of 2250 Southwest Marine Dr. would have paid an empty homes tax of $466,600. In fact, with the property currently assessed at $4.66 million, the owners would have paid an empty homes tax of $46,600.

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