OrJustAnotherCountryVille
"...Condominium properties are the last bastion of relative affordability in Vancouver..."
You know.
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Subheader put a worm in your ear?....This!
...The average price for condos hit $723,827 in March, up 22.8 per cent from a year earlier and just shy of the record $751,358 in January...
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Subheader put a worm in your ear?....This!
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8 comments:
what popped up was a very young Sex Pistols singing I'm the anti Christ. when you think of the real estate market in B.C. and that song, yes, they do go together.
Developers ensured condos did not remain affordable. They wanted to make money and built and marketed LUXURY condos for people other than those living and working here. Too bad the government didn't do what Australia and N.Z. did because there is still lots of room for prices to go up. A 2,300 hundred sq. ft. 2 hundred year old town house in London, $9M Where do the working people live? very far away.
The foreign tax needs to be higher or there be a ban on foreign ownership of houses and they may only own one condo for their personal use. People like the Mayor of Nanaimo who wants Nanaimo, to be excluded from the foreign owners tax must either be in bed with foreign owners and their representatives or out of his mind and not know what has happened in the lower mainland and Kelowa. Prices of homes in some areas of Nanaimo have gone up $100K in one year and that may not sound like much compared to the lower mainland, but it where the lower mainland was 10 years ago.
Perhaps NFLD ought to keep those outport open. People from B.C. may have to go live there.
eaf--
'Twas the pre-EMI Pistols back when they actually had a bass player named Matlock that was not related to Andy Griffith..
Key, though, is the tune itself.
Especially the alphabet soup verse of 'Anarchy In The UK', as that was a concept that ruled over so many things British at the time.
We have a variation on that soupy theme going on here now...Except our alphabeteers are all peddling astroturf, real estate-driven, et cetera.
Thus the 'UDI' of the sub-header.
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The banks love it when people go deeper into debt to pay for over-priced real estate.
Real estate people love the higher commissions they get from over-priced real estate.
Govt loves the higher taxes they get from over-priced real estate.
Last thing local govts. want is for property prices to go down, there goes the
ever growing annual property tax income.
"Never Mind the Bollocks" is the Sex Pistols album that springs to mind, and should be the mantra for most of us.
“Them that has gets…”
And the Andrews Sisters were pointing it out long before the Sex Pistols.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idzxVynX2XY
To be clear, Keith, property tax assessments are based on the values of properties relative to each other, and those assessments are used to apportion the tax levied on each. The amount of tax required for stuff, roads, police, etc., is distributed among the weighted values of individual properties. Thus it is immaterial how much properties are worth in the absolute. If all real estate prices dropped by half, the tax requirement would still be the same and, all other real estate prices being equally halved, the weightings would also be the same.
The amount of tax levied is not based on property values but on the amount required to pay for public admin and services. The value of properties are assessed purely to apportion the burden fairly, the more valuable properties paying proportionately more of the burden than less valuable properties. Civic budgets detail how much money, and for what project, public administrators require. This is what property owners should pay attention to, not assessments per se. The only beef a property owner might have is if his or her property is assessed disproportionately or unfairly higher (or, conversely, a similar property in the assessment area is assessed disproportionately lower.)
Over a six year period about a decade ago my assessments went steadily up, but my property taxes went down because, as it happened, a lot of very valuable waterfronts properties were sold during this assessment period, much more valuable than my inland property , which made my property relatively less burdened with the taxes required for roads, police, etc. That is, the more valuable properties paid a commensurately larger portion of the tax burden than I did.
If anything, tax authorities like municipalities should be concerned that as property values skyrocket, the buyers have less money left over to pay their taxes.
Consider one suggestion a neighbour made: she suggested waterfront property owners should appeal to have their assessments lowered on the ground that shellfish industry activity on their immediate foreshores effectively reduces the value of their properties. What had eluded her was that because assessments serve only to weight values relative to all others in the area (in order to apportion the tax burden fairly), then all properties along the shore would be similarly devalued. While it might be true that the industry devalues adjacent property values, it doesn’t concern the assessment for tax apportioning purposes since all the properties would be equally devalued—if indeed it’s true they are for this reason. The adjudicator would only want to know if all properties so located were assessed in the same way, that is, fairly, irrespective of the reason why.
Gosh.
Lew makes a good point about the Andrews Sisters' prescience.
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Scotty is entirely correct. Property assessments and the relation to taxation has to be the least understood issue amongst all homeowners.
What (the provincial) government is addicted to is the property transfer tax - a disgusting tax if ever there was one. A tax that does nothing to improve affordability, something all governments profess to support. Not.
Ironically, the transfer tax was introduced by non other than Mr "lets kill the HST", Bill Vanderzalm. When property values were so much lower, it was easy to slough off the tax..now not so much.
Thanks Bill.
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