CEO's message: Board receives Competition Bureau letter

The Supreme Court of Canada announced recently that it won’t hear the Toronto Real Estate Board’s (TREB) appeal of a 2016 Competition Tribunal decision.

The ruling calls on TREB to permit the display of previous home sale prices, pending sold prices—where no conditions remain other than closing— and cooperating commissions within its members’ password-protected Virtual Office Websites.

We received a letter from the Competition Bureau last week about this ruling. They requested to meet with us to discuss our policies on the use and online display of MLS® information. They’d also like to know about any changes we’re considering.

While this just occurred, we want to make you aware that the TREB/Bureau decision has immediately become a matter for REBGV and its members. Change is upon us.

We’re working with our legal counsel to better understand these issues and communicate with the Bureau.

Our goal is to ensure we’re working in your best interest and meeting our legal responsibilities on your behalf.

We’ll keep you up-to-date on this issue through our communications channels. We’re planning a series of member meetings this fall to discuss this and other key issues facing our profession. Dates and registration details will be announced later this month.

In the meantime, the Canadian Real Estate Association created this FAQ document to help you better understand the key issues stemming from the TREB case. I encourage you to read it.

Sincerely,

Brad Scott
CEO
Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver

Register for Council’s agency and disclosure course

Deepen your knowledge of the Real Estate Council of BC’s (Council’s) new rules and complete their mandatory course at the same time.

Rule Changes: Agency and Disclosure is a self-paced online course that gives you information to help you understand and comply with the rule changes that took effect June 15. You’ll learn:

• when to use the new disclosure forms;
• the reasons for the changes to agency and disclosure;
• how you may need to adapt your day-to-day business practices; and
• how to communicate effectively with consumers about the required disclosures and changes to agency.

Registration is open, so don’t hesitate!

Completion required to renew your-licence

As of October 1, you’ll need to provide the letter you receive for completing this course when you renew your licence. That’s less than a month away. If your licence expires in October or later, you should register for the course as soon as possible.

Course details

• The course consists of five online modules. Each module contains a lesson and an assessment. You must score 70 per cent or higher to pass each assessment.
• The course should take approximately five to six hours to complete. You must complete it within three days of registration.
• The cost of the course is $75 plus tax.

You can review the full details on Council’s website.

If you have questions, email education@recbc.ca

Get school catchment and area boundary information using our new Community Maps tool

Looking for details about zoning or school catchments in a particular neighbourhood? Or maybe you need to find the boundary line between two sub-areas? Get these details and more using our new Community Maps.

Click here to view our Community Maps.

This new Board service is also accessible from the REALTOR® Toolbox on our home page or in the "Resources" section of Paragon under "REBGV Quick Links".

What is Community Maps?

We’ve taken available mapping technology and added layers of information to help you better serve your clients. This mapping tool includes area and sub-area boundaries, municipal zoning designations (for some of our areas and sub-areas), and school locations.

The result is an REBGV-crafted service that displays information at the click of a button. You can browse areas and sub-areas in a list and see the boundaries live on the map, or you can enter an address to find a property location.

What other information can I find?

• Zoning designations - click on the zoning tab and choose an area
• Schools - click on the schools tab to bring up a menu that allows you to select elementary, middle, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Click on the school type to display the catchments

Need help?

Contact our Help Desk at 604-730-3020.

The Ethics Guy®: The market, it's a changin'

You probably know better than I that for the past few months the pace of sales has significantly slowed. There are fewer multiple offer presentations, and sellers have, I understand, become more pliable recently. The buyers left in the marketplace are able to take their time, consider more than one property, and then negotiate a deal over a series of offers and counter-offers instead of having to respond to the standard line of the last few years: “Make your offer now (and it better be an eye-popping one) or someone else will buy the place in an hour or two.”

It’s been a good run, but markets change, which is healthy, but some of you may not yet be used to this new reality. The last uniformly slower market I recall was in 2008/09. Before that, the slow periods were 1998 to 2001, 1994 to 1995, and, the granddaddy of them all, 1981 to 1986. In between, the market has been more robust, at least for sellers.

Regardless of the market—home sellers still need REALTORS® to advise them on pricing their property, making it showable, negotiating a good outcome, and handling the myriad of issues that come up along the way. Realtors have been at the centre of most real estate transactions since our Board was established in 1919. This is a long history of success, and we should all be gratified with how we’ve helped buyers and sellers realize their goals over the last century. Sure, there’ve been a few hiccups along the way, with a minority of members conducting themselves in ways that resulted in what may have felt like a visit from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on us all, but we’ve always gotten through, and we’ll continue to get through whatever may come. We’ll be there, helping our clients buy and sell their properties, just as we’ve always done.

Which brings me to a few suggestions for changing gears to enable a smooth transition to our current market. The key is to remember that we all need our colleagues’ goodwill to even get in the game.

Take, for example, a buyer’s agent whose buyer wants to buy a Vancouver Special. On the day I checked MLS® Public Remarks in late August, there were 87 Vancouver Specials listed for sale. Is our buyer’s agent going to show them all to her buyer? Nope, not unless she’s new. If she’s more experienced, has qualified her buyers, and has some measure of control over them, she’ll show, maybe, 10 properties—leaving 77 others not shown.

Think about this if you’re a seller’s agent. How do you get your seller’s home on the buyer’s agent’s list of properties to show? Here are a few things not to do: be slow to return calls, prickly to deal with, and inflexible.

Why do these details matter? With so many options, the buyer’s agent doesn’t need any grief and will be much happier dealing with other members who are not out to annoy her. The knife cuts both ways, of course. Buyers’ agents who don’t show up at appointments on time, don’t properly prepare their buyers for the properties they’re going to be seeing, and/or are also prickly to deal with simply won’t get the cooperation they need to get a showing and an offer presentation.

Keep in mind that each of us works for ourselves, but we don’t work by ourselves. We need help from our colleagues to get our clients where they need to go. When markets change, our habits may need to change. (Some habits shouldn’t have become habits in the first place, of course.) So think about how you treat your colleagues and what your clients expect of you. If you look in the mirror and see you have developed a few bad habits over the years, it’s time for a re-set. One day we'll again see a seller’s market. But who knows when? Can you and your clients afford to wait?

Did you know?

We have a new course that deals with properly completing the Data Input Form - click here to learn more. 

More than enough mortgage rules, GST 101, and where’s the market headed?

Helping politicians help us

When a federal MP asked for help informing her colleagues in Ottawa about the effects of the new mortgage stress test on young families, your Board’s Government Relations Committee went into action.

Read more.

GST 101

The GST is a complex tax and the Canada Revenue Agency's explanatory bulletins run hundreds of pages long. Here’s our summary of the key facts you and your clients need to know.

Read more.

Where’s the market headed?

We went to the experts from Central 1 Credit Union to find out. Here’s their forecast.

Read more.

Help us support the Red Cross BC wild fire relief fund

There are over 550 wild fires burning throughout the province, with as many as 20,000 residents affected by either evacuation orders or the loss of personal property.

The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) has created a fundraising website in conjunction with the BC Red Cross. We encourage you to visit the page and make a donation.

Your Board has already pledged $5,000, and the BC Real Estate Association plans to pledge $1,500.

You can also share this appeal across your social media accounts using content from the REALTORS Care® Facebook page and Twitter account.

Home buyer demand stays below historical averages in August

The Metro Vancouver housing market continues to experience reduced demand across all housing types.

Sales

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV) reports that residential home sales in the region totalled 1,929 in August 2018, a 36.6 per cent decrease from the 3,043 sales recorded in August 2017, and a 6.8 per cent decline compared to July 2018 when 2,070 homes sold.

Last month’s sales were 25.2 per cent below the 10-year August sales average.

“Home buyers have been less active in recent months and we’re beginning to see prices edge down for all housing types as a result,” Phil Moore, REBGV president said. “Buyers today have more listings to choose from and face less competition than we’ve seen in our market in recent years.”

Listings

There were 3,881 detached, attached and apartment homes newly listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service® (MLS®) in Metro Vancouver in August 2018. This represents an 8.6 per cent decrease compared to the 4,245 homes listed in August 2017 and an 18.6 per cent decrease compared to July 2018 when 4,770 homes were listed.

The total number of homes currently listed for sale on the MLS® system in Metro Vancouver is 11,824, a 34.3 per cent increase compared to August 2017 (8,807) and a 2.6 per cent decrease compared to July 2018 (12,137).

The sales-to-active listings ratio for August 2018 is 16.3 per cent. By housing type, the ratio is 9.1 per cent for detached homes, 19.4 per cent for townhomes, and 26.6 per cent for apartments.

Generally, analysts say that downward pressure on home prices occurs when the ratio dips below the 12 per cent mark for a sustained period, while home prices often experience upward pressure when it surpasses 20 per cent over several months.

“With fewer buyers active in the market, benchmark prices across all three housing categories have declined for two consecutive months across the region,” Moore said.

HPI Benchmark Price

The MLS® Home Price Index composite benchmark price for all residential properties in Metro Vancouver is currently $1,083,400. This represents a 4.1 per cent increase over August 2017 and a 1.9 per cent decrease since May 2018.

Sales of detached properties in August 2018 reached 567, a 37.1 per cent decrease from the 901 detached sales recorded in August 2017. The benchmark price for detached properties is $1,561,000. This represents a 3.1 per cent decrease from August 2017 and a 2.8 per cent decrease since May 2018.

Sales of apartment properties reached 1,025 in August 2018, 36.5 per cent decrease compared to the 1,613 sales in August 2017. The benchmark price of an apartment property is $695,500. This represents a 10.3 per cent increase from August 2017 and a 1.6 per cent decrease since May 2018.

Attached property sales in August 2018 totalled 337, a 36.3 per cent decrease compared to the 529 sales in August 2017. The benchmark price of an attached unit is $846,100. This represents a 7.9 per cent increase from August 2017 and a 0.8 per cent decrease since May 2018.

Click here to download the full stats package.