Finding First Home in Vancouver

Tricky, old-school and overpriced. 18 January — 26 January 2017. This week we’ve spent searching online, walking around the city, exploring available options and getting the feel of the market. Everything you read online is probably true — housing market in Vancouver is crazy, crowded, overpriced… Availability rate is somewhere around 1%. But what does it really mean?

Hobbit House in Vancouver. All of the buildings are named

Process of finding our first home

We had some insight on how to do it since our last visit here around 2 years ago. Nothing really changed since then. One may ask if AirBNB can help with that. The answer is no. Prices for short-term rentals are often 50 to 100% higher than for the long-term — so this option is definitely ruled out. Next one on our list was craigslist: https://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/hhh. This gives you plenty of search options — filter out what you need, group duplicates and start sending emails or calling. 90% of listings that you like would be unavailable, because people didn’t care to remove them. Other 10% is what you need to sift through — and it’s quite challenging. In our case we were looking for 1 bedroom apartment with washer and dryer in unit, underground parking stall and decent size above 550 square feet (which is not much at all) in Metro Vancouver area, to be precise, West End, Yaletown, Gastown, Downtown and Chinatown would all be just fine. Please note, monthly rent for 1 BD in these areas vary from 1600 CAD to 2200 CAD. Moreover, listings that were priced exactly the same could easily have no utilities included at all, parking stall for extra $ and hidden fees… Every day a few new options would become available, so make sure that you check them regularly. Make sure not to stop on that. There is much more that you can do to find your new home. Best thing craigslist did for us was an understanding of the market prices & who were the main players on it.

Example of listings for Metro Vancouver Area on Craigslist on 1st of February 2017

After you are done with daily chores of looking through classifieds — walk around neighbourhoods you like and often you will see buildings with management phones posted & whether there is a rental available. Call the manager, ask for options — that way you can find an apartment that was recently renovated, cheaper than the market and is not even yet listed online. Our friend found a great rental on the top floor of a building in West End for only 1500 CAD and it was absolutely gorgeous. Surely, the building was not as new, but it doesn’t matter as much when the price is so great, does it?

At the end of the day you would probably be tired like we were. However, there were always a few good listings we would follow up, but what’s more important is a list of agencies, management & investment companies that actually lease everything out. You would rarely interact with an actual owner and the whole city is divided between the corporations that take care of your housing problems. It’s not easy to track all of their listings, there is not a single place of truth on all of these listings, and that’s where the real fun begins. After 4–5 days of gathering information we’ve created a list of resources of these agencies where we could find most of the listings. Funny fact, most of these agencies use similar themed WordPress based websites with listings — might as well had just one website for them all, but that would’ve been too easy.

Short list of resources we’ve used to find our home:

• Craigslist — classifieds, https://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/hhh
• Prompton — mostly downtown Vancouver, https://www.prompton.com/
• Hollyburn — West End, http://www.hollyburn.com/
• DexterPM — seems to be overpriced, http://dexterpm.ca/
• Makeyourselfathome — overpriced, http://makeyourselfathome.com/vancouver-neighborhoods.html
• BC Condos — somewhat of a registry of condos , http://bccondos.net/
• Advent — cant say much , https://www.rentwithadvent.com/
• Biddwell — this one seem to be interesting, a lot of fresh options, https://www.biddwell.com/

There could be a few more, but these are the ones we were actively using. All of those listed as overpriced could still be looked at. Don’t hesitate to call and ask for a lower price — that often works.

Scheduling viewings & price negotiations

Now that you know where to search for your house let’s get to the process of leasing. First thing you need to do is schedule a viewing. As I’ve mentioned earlier — 90% of the listings won’t be available, won’t have phone numbers and would be hard to reach to. We’ve sent dozens of emails & texted & called. Often you would get no response at all or it would be too slow — like in 4 days after you’ve sent a message. By that time you’ve likely forgotten that you’ve even sent it and would have to find the listing all over again before understanding who is calling you and why. Viewing itself would often be a group one — since people working at the management companies don’t like to do that a lot and definitely don’t like to work overtime — keep that in mind, regular working hours are from 9–10 am to 18 pm. Don’t expect to get any answers when they are not working, unless you are very lucky — apartments are in demand and generally nobody cares if they rent it a few days later to somebody else.

So, let’s imagine you’ve got to the viewing — you must make a good impression of yourself. Think of that as an initial screening process — it’s not really you, who is choosing the apartment, it’s you, who are allowed to live there in the future. Nevertheless, make sure that you get all the information about the place that you need.

Questions to ask about the listing on the viewing:

• How much is the rent?
• Damage deposit. It’s illegal for it to be more than 50% of the monthly rent
• What’s included in it? Gas, heat, hydro, cable, etc. Make a list not to forget. Often rent would be lower, but all the utilities aren’t included
• Leasing term — fixed, month to month, fees for early termination, what happens at the end of the fixed term. Make sure that you are not required to re-sign the lease after the end of the term, because otherwise it’s legally possible to increase the rent for more than allowed ~3% per year regardless of the tenant. Something that you should be comfortable with is a 1 year lease, which rolls over into month to month lease with an option to sign another 1 year term and so on. This is for both yours’ and landlords’ protection
• Parking stall — included or not, if included — for extra $ or not. If you don’t have a car and live in downtown you would easily rent it out to someone else, because they can cost up to 300$ / month and parking is scarce
• Additional fees. There would be plenty — often it includes move in/out fess & damage deposit for common areas. These are actually regulated by the strata you will be living in
• Common areas — swimming pool, gym, meeting rooms, theatre, library, hot tub, sauna, bike storage, etc. There could be a lot of special amenities. Check that you have all the needed ones and ensure that you don’t need to pay for something such as gym — we’ve seen listings where you are actually required to pay 30$/mo to use it, what a nonsense
• On unit maintenance — who’s responsible, who pays for emergencies, etc
• Tenant insurance — required or not, what coverage, etc. Usually you would want that anyway — it’s rather cheap 25–30$/mo and can save you a lot of trouble

Amenities in one of the buildings in Vancouver

There are a few more things like size of the apt, w/d in unit, what appliances it has — but you would like to see that for yourself during the viewing and this should all be written on the listing before you schedule the meeting.

After all the questions from the list are answered — you would know how much the apartment actually costs per month. If you see it’s overpriced — don’t hesitate to bargain. Owners often ask for more, well, because they always want more, but there is a high chance they would rent it out to you for less if you state your budget and is ready to pass on that listing if they won’t agree. You have to know you price no matter how good the apartment is — make sure you can afford it. When you negotiate you will get 2 types of answers — this apartment is owned by an investment company and they have fully rented all the other apartments, so there is no way on earth they would go below that price — then you know that you will pay that much or won’t and the other one would be — we will check with the owners and see whether they agree. This is where your good impression might come on handy — the more agents like you — the easier it is for them to convince the owners that it’s worth dropping the price a bit to rent it sooner.

Our “must have” list

1. Average or below the market rent, including all utilities and hidden fees
2. Modern Kitchen (I loath 15 year old electric stoves that look like they are from the stone age)
3. Washer and Dryer in unit
4. Unfurnished
5. Bike Storage
6. Designated Parking Stall
7. Gym & Swimming pool
8. Availability of grocery stores in the walking distance (less than 3–5 mins away)

Sending offer for the lease

This is a lot of paperwork. Procedures differ from one management company to another, but generally you would either get an online or paper form to sign where you put in most of your details about:

1. previous addresses
2. recommendations
3. income
4. desired renting price
5. employment situation
6. banking details and authorization to do credit check
7. extra info

Then you send it over along with supporting documents (can wait on that, but I’d recommend doing that ASAP, so that there is less chance of having other applications come in while you are being processed). Check-in after a day or two to make sure that your offer was received and what the status is and whether anything else is needed.

If everything goes well your offer would be accepted and then you would get to signing the documents — make sure you read all of them, as this would generally define what you are responsible for. In case you are not sure in something — seek legal help.

Keys for our new home

View from one of the rentals we looked at

It took us 9 days to deal with the housing question. Exhausted, but very excited we’ve received the keys to our first home in Canada for at least the next year. Today is 26th of January 2017 and it marks an important step in our new chapter of life. I’m sure some of you will be going through the same process as we did and I really hope that this story would save you some trouble. Let me know if you want something else included in this article after you read it.

Next on the list is getting medical insurance (we’ve actually already done that), buying a car, exchanging driver’s license and understanding the car insurance system.

Stay tuned!