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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Considering single family home prices in Vancouver are down ~20% since last summer, I’d say the new taxes and new buildings are working!

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Right? It's weird. This article states prices are down $170,000:

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/04/02/vancouver-house-pri...

And https://www.zolo.ca/vancouver-real-estate/trends shows overall trending downwards.

Seems like it's working.

July 2018 to present look like noise to me in that graph. For what it's worth.

I'll take this "noise" as a success, considering that the previous few years saw insane 20% YoY growth. Crashing the market overnight was not the government's task.

Are apartments also down? You can easily get the situation were expensive homes are down, but cheap apartments are up.

Yes, apartments are now selling under asking price.

In Canada is an apartment what the us would call a condo or something similar?

Canadians don’t differentiate between apartment and condo.

It was really weird moving to the states and have people care which word I used.

(Extra) Fun Fact: Canadians do differentiate (a lot) between University and College. Something Americans do not do.

Canadians differentiate between condos and apartments. at least, they do in every town/city I've lived/hung around in {Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver}

Now I'm curious, what do they mean in America? As a Canadian I think both words describe a single unit in a multi-story building, but say "apartment" if the entire building is owned by one company and all units are rented, and "condo" if each unit is sold to an individual owner (who may still rent it out privately if they want). I rent an apartment, I'd buy a condo. They're physically the same thing, just different ownership models. Most Canadians I know (Vancouver/Calgary) do the same.

This is an accurate description of the difference.

What I have encountered is that the word apartment is accepted for any residential unit while words that specifically relate to the nature of occupancy are not always used because that may be ambiguous. Is an apartment the only residential unit in the building? Is an apartment a condo, joint or fractional ownership, rental, or timeshare? All of these tend to be referred to casually as apartments unless more is known and needs to be communicated.

In the market of people who would buy a house / condo with the proceeds of their job, you will see the cheap stuff bought first and go up in price while expensive stuff goes down until they reach an equilibrium point of pricing of whatever people can afford.

Yup.

https://vallarino.ca/blog/downtown-vancouver-condo-price-gra...

Yes, Vancouver downtown apartments were $1200/sq feet. Apparently you need at least $1 million US dollars to have a family of four living in downtown Vancouver. Crazy huh.

Also the new mortgage stress test rules and the increase in rates from 2.5% to 3.5% or so

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