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Buyer’s market not enough for all would-be purchasers

We’re in a buyer’s market, which should be good news for anyone looking to buy a home, unless, of course, you don’t have one to sell.

We’re in a buyer’s market, which should be good news for anyone looking to buy a home, unless, of course, you don’t have one to sell.

At the start of this week, I counted 27 homes in Ladner listed for under $1 million and another 20 being marketed for less than $1.1 million, while Tsawwassen had eight under the $1-million mark and another dozen below $1.1 million. Given it wasn’t that long ago you were hard pressed to find anything under seven digits, the fact you’ve got some choice in that price range in South Delta would rightly suggest it’s a good time for buyers.

This modest shift towards purchasers will certainly be helpful, but it’s difficult to buy the notion we’re somehow in a buyer’s market when so many would-be buyers are still being left on the sidelines thanks to a super-charged real estate market in Greater Vancouver.

The idea of anyone jumping straight into a single-family home in South Delta has been laughable for quite a few years now, but just for some perspective, if you were able to save $100,000 for a down payment on a million-dollar home, you’d need an annual income in the neighbourhood of $170,000 to handle the mortgage payments on one of the least expensive places in town.

Let’s cut that figure in half and say you’ve got $500,000 to spend on somewhere to live in South Delta. Well, that gives you a choice of exactly one townhouse, but on the bright side, there are 10 condos, and the best news is you only need to be making about $85,000 a year to qualify for what would be one of the cheapest pieces of real estate available.

It’s hard to comprehend for those who got into the market decades ago, but there are many gainfully employed people out there who will never own a place of their own and many others that do own property but look at a single-family home as little more than a pipe dream. A slight downward turn has offered a bit of help in that regard, perhaps making the jump from multi-family to single-family seem a little more possible, but the underlying challenges remain.

When you’re talking about Greater Vancouver’s housing market, all things are relative, from so-called bargains to what are passed off as affordable payments. The same applies to a buyer’s market.