Vancouver real estate IV

If you look at BC, the only flat livable land is located in this little triangle surrounding Vancouver, the rest are mountains. In Canada, you can say that this is the only place in the west where human settlement is possible. Strategically, Vancouver is protected from sea by Victoria island while surrounded by mountains on all side giving it the weather of rain forests. This geographical advantage, along with the massive Chinese immigration that is to come, formed the base that decidedly changed my opinion on the direction of Vancouver’s real estate prices.

The massive Chinese immigration began about 3 years ago and up until this point, consists purely of the super rich and some rich as is evident by the ratio of Porshe and Mustangs to normal cars driven by 20 year olds. Whereas the super rich would gobble 3~4 houses at a time, the rich gobbles up only one with each house costing above $1 million dollars. The trend should continue, until the immigration moves to the middle class sector, in which case, activities in Surrey and Burnaby should become more elevated. Until that point is reached, I fail to see a change in the behavior of these Hot Asian Money (HAM). It is eerily reminding me of the rush before 1997 Hong Kong deadline except, there’s no deadline this time.

Strategy wise, the Real Estate agents from China have brought over their techniques of house bidding over to this side of the world. While most Canadians would walk away when seeing the technique in play, Asians from China who are proxy bidding through their agents think of it as the most natural of things. The two world clashes and the victor will be those with enough money that end up being the majority as it is a war of perception. If Canada’s economy falls before China, then the Chinese mentality will prevail and vice versa.

Remember bidding wars? Where every potential buyers shows up on the same day to facilitate competition while everyone is allowed one bid on a price without knowing the price of everyone else. This is done to ensure that everyone will put the highest bid in their financial capability. Yeah this evil one. This is now outdated. I recently learned of a new twist to this technique which is evil beyond my liking. Now, there is a second round after the initial round of bidding, where the 3 top buyers are selected for a second round of bidding and the first round’s bid prices are made known to everyone else. What this does is that it ensures a price higher than the highest bid from the first round. Pure and utterly evil genius and the whole process is done in Mandarin, giving English speaking natives a disadvantage. In fact, I don’t think the agents want to waste time with Canadians with our inspections and laws and waiting for bank approval of financing.

Speaking of inspection. I wouldn’t want to buy one of these “Monster Houses”. The ones that are built to Asian’s desires where there’s no garden and the whole plot is used while any empty spaces are concrete instead of grass. There was a backlash a while ago about the pure ugliness of these houses, now there aren’t anymore. Why would you complain when they just made you a millionaire within the span of 3 years? On top of the ugliness, the construction are very suspect. Most of these monster houses are empty, indicating that their owners hasn’t even seen it in real life and I suspect that they are built specifically to be sold to people still in Mainland China. The materials used are the worst part. Sure it looked fine and dandy on the outside, but oh god. Where do I start.

For starters, there’s no digging no anchoring no foundation besides laying the shape of the house in concrete on top of SAND!!!! Yes Richmond’s soil are made of silt/sand and is very fickle when push comes to shove and there would be no point of building any foundation instead of just letting your house “float”. Maybe it’s normal, I am just surprised that there’s no law forcing builders to have deep anchors punched into the ground. The material used for horizontal beams are these compressed chunks of wood that, in theory, should be as strong as real wood. “In theory” because when these compressed wood flakes + glue wood beams meets humid air, you get mush over time. The vertical beams are no better as they are made out of shorter sticks combined together. Sure, when sustaining weight vertically, there’s no difference between these and real wood, but any horizontal shake and you can bet that these beams will snap into different pieces faster than real ones. And the quality of these wood… Pick one up, and pick one up from parts of the 30 year old building I live in and you can immediately see that the older wood are two times heavier than the recent ones.

These houses are meant to be traded. Do not make the mistake of living in one.