I'm back on the blog after an extended break (from blogging, not work!) and looking forward to an exciting year for 2010. My husband and I have been busily renovating our newly acquired character home and I have been working on our new site, featuring BC  luxury real estate, which will be launched early this Spring!

 

Below are some of the highlights to come for Waterfront West in 2010:

We will be upgrading and redesigning Waterfront West to make the user experience more seamless and bring new technology to the site including new search capabilities, a video community and an "Ask an Expert" section.

We will be launching our new site which will be one of the first BC luxury real estate sites to feature a social networking community (like Facebook), a video component featuring in-house videos about sought-after B.C. communities and huge picture viewer for seeing luxury property photos.

We are continuing to send out our "Hot Properties" newsletter featuring properties of exceptional value in the BC waterfront market and we will also be featuring a "Property of the Month" in this blog.

By request, we have added a new category for BC waterfront rentals to our business directory . Now waterfront accommodation owners can list their property here free of charge and add links for a short yearly fee.

 

So, to summarize, as you can see, this year holds a lot of promise and many changes will be happening in the months ahead. Stay tuned to www.waterfrontwest.com to see the evolution.

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The Landcor BC 2008 Residential Sales Summary was released earlier this week with some surprising statistics. Although there was an overall (anticipated) 28% decrease in the number of residential sales in BC in 2008 (over 2007), the average sales price increased 10% over 2007. This sounds hard to believe amidst all the negative media out there, but is most likely due to the sales in the 1st and 2nd quarters weighing heavily on the stats. The price drops we have seen in recent months are often not reflected in statistics until a later date so I would expect them to show up in next years' stats.

Other highlights of the report are detailed here:

    *  Detached homes and vacant land had the greatest decrease in number of sales and condos the least.
    * Q4 was miserable with a 36% drop in sales over Q3.
    * Out-of-province buyers down by 37%.

A note on the out of province buyers: Albertans still remain the leaders. 69% of out of province buyers hailed from Alberta in 2008. The most popular areas for them to purchase included the Okanagan and the Kootenays and condos and vacant land were their most popular choices for types of real estate to buy.

Conclusion:

As I mentioned above, the price increases seen in 2008 were in my opinion a result of strong sales last Spring before the market really started to take a turn for the worse. I would expect to see decreases in prices as we review 2009 statistics.

The good news is that since prices have started to become more competitive in recent months, the buyers have started to return to the market. Many of our clients are reporting more inquiries and deals going through in the last month. In addition, many sellers are becoming aware that the market has changed and pricing their homes well. Hopefully this will be enough to give the market some pep again and we'll avoid a situation similar to what they have in the US (although things are starting to look up there again too in some areas).

 

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Since we started the site, Canadians generally comprised approximately 75-78% of our traffic. While the number of Canadian visitors to our site is actually higher than last year, the percent of Canadian visitors as a total has decreased to about 67%. Meanwhile, traffic from other countries, namely the US and Germany has increased slightly. The increase in US traffic may be due in part to our alliance with Interluxe which targets mainly US luxury consumers. The two biggest states in the US for visitors to our site are California and Arizona followed by Washington State. Perhaps the low Canadian dollar is enticing those US buyers who have not been affected by the recession (or maybe a few of these visitors are Canadian snowbirds?)...

Interestingly, despite the poor economic outlook in Canada, the percent of British Columbians visiting our site for this time period has remained steady at 67% of Canadian traffic. Albertan traffic has dropped only slightly from 21% of our Canadian traffic to 18% and visitors from Ontario have increased from 4 to 6% of our Canadian traffic.

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