Great time to buy

When Peter Simpson sent out invites to this year’s annual FirstTime Home Buyer Seminar, he expected the housing slump to leave a fair number of seats empty at the March 24 event. Instead, to his surprise there weren’t enough.

“We were concerned that attendance might be lower due to the state of the economy, but our fears were unfounded,” said Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association. “We had record attendance . . . Nearly 900 young people registered for this. We had to stop taking registrations seven hours prior to the seminar because it was fully booked up.”

According to Simpson, the seminar’s smashing success was indication that a new strain of spring fever has broken out in the real-estate market, and he only expects that trend to intensify during the GVHBA’s other big spring event, the upcoming seventh annual Spring Parade of New Homes. He pointed to results of a survey the GVHBA conducted during the seminar three weeks ago showing 75 per cent of attendees plan to purchase a home within a year, and 31 per cent within six months, as reason for sellers to smile.

“I believe that first-time home buyers recognize that there are factors at play that are in their favour,” he said of his high hopes for the Parade’s turnout. “Those three factors are that real-estate prices have dropped, mortgage rates are at historically low levels, and there is a good selection of completed homes on the market.”

The Spring Parade of New Homes works like a giant synchronized open house, putting 13 big-name builders like Adera, Polygon and Morningstar together in one program for an extensive self-guided tour. The purpose is to give prospective buyers a convenient chance to visit and compare up to 54 showhomes in six Greater Vancouver municipalities, over the course of an eight-day run. The participating home sites are in Coquitlam, Delta, Langley, Maple Ridge, North Vancouver and Surrey.

“People attend the parade because they want to find out what’s new in design, in construction technology, and they want to see what’s among the best that’s out there,” Simpson said. “If you haven’t been through model homes before, you’re going to see a lot in terms of the technological changes and different materials that are being used these days.”

The name of this year’s spring tour is “It’s a great time to buy!” and Simpson has a long list of statistics and recent announcements to back it up.

First, in response to the slowdown in sales, many developers have drastically dropped their prices over the past few months.

Simpson said the reductions have largely been the result of companies negotiating with their suppliers and sub-trades to reduce prices without sacrificing quality.

“It’s a team approach to it, and it doesn’t work without everybody participating in it, and some of the builders have been quite successful in doing that,” he said.

Cameron McNeill, president of Vancouver’s MAC Marketing Solutions, has been on the inside track of the discount movement, having launched a successful campaign called MACBulk earlier this year that liquidated almost 400 condos for prominent developer Onni in just eight weeks.

He is now in the process of launching a second Bulk marketing project, this time representing three developers intent on moving their standing inventory (see next week’s Sunday Homes section in The Province for the full story on MACBulk’s new project).

“The discounts vary depending on the project, but they all represent great value to the customer,” said McNeill. “Generally, they are in the 20 to 30 per cent range.”

Finally, Simpson noted, the average posted interest rate for a fiveyear fixed-rate mortgage had dropped from 7.49 per cent two years ago to 4.25 per cent by the end of last month, according to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. This would translate into a monthly mortgage payment today that is 26 per cent lower than it would have been at the end of 2007.

Of course, you still need to come up with the money, so it was no shock seminar attendees indicated that housing prices and down payments needed were their No.1 and No. 2 concerns about buying.

To appeal to buyers with varying budgets, the Spring Parade of New Homes includes a broad range of housing styles and price ranges, from single-family detached homes, townhomes and rowhomes to lowrise condos and four-plex manor homes, the least expensive of which starts at $209,900.

("Parade of Homes: ‘A great time to buy’ " prepared by Kate Webb/Vancouver Province)