The pandemic has yet to lessen the strength of the multi-family apartment segment
In Vancouver’s housing sector, primary home purchases have slowed down, but investor activity has intensified.
“The market is on pause right now,” CBRE’s Lance Coulson told Business in Vancouver. “I am advising property owners to hold off listing until this crisis settles.”
Similar decelerations have been apparent in Toronto and London, but Vancouver’s multi-family apartment segment is helping compensate for BC’s much weaker residential and commercial markets.
Investors continue to snap up Vancouver’s rental apartments amid the coronavirus outbreak.
“This is counter to the weeks prior where we were hearing that developers were done with Vancouver because of bad policies discouraging rental development,” Goodman Commercial Inc. principal Mark Goodman stated.
A major factor in this trend is the steady downward movement of interest rates: During the last full week of March, lending rates on CMHC-insured mortgages to apartment buyers veered as low as 1.8% on five-year loans and 2.1% on 10-year loans.
This was inevitable considering the fundamental stability of residential rental assets, according to Derek Lobo of SVN Rock Advisors.
“Other than the drugstores, the grocery stores and Netflix, almost every industry is envious of apartment owners. Everybody needs someplace to live, and I think things are going to be better for our industry than most.”
