Our "Home"

In January, Allison and I took a discovery trip up to Vancouver for a week.  We spent most of this time experiencing the area and searching for potentially suitable housing. 

The real estate market in Vancouver is similar to the west coast USA, with some issues specific to this area further driving up market value.  So a 1300sqft townhouse will run between $300/400K and single family homes between $500K and +1 Million depending on where you are located.   The market in general has been on a rocket ship for over 10 years now, rarely appreciating less than 5%, and usually more.  As a result, this has brought in significant investment dollars into real estate.  Of the rental homes that we looked at, more than 50% were owned by investors from China or the Middle east.  As remote investments, they were usually not cared for particularly well. 

The other phenomena that we discovered is that a significant number of people rent because it takes a reasonably high family income to purchase property.  One agent told us that they typically have less than 3% vacancy of rental inventory in this area and attractive properties put up for rent are often rented and back off the market in days, not weeks or months. 


In quite random fashion, we came across a Craig-list rental ad for a home that was close to the office.  After calling the rental management company, we were surprised to find out that it was a family, also taking an international assignment, who was looking for a long term lease tenant.  The property was beautiful and the more we researched it, the more perfect it sounded.  It was less than 4 miles to my office, the local school was rated very high and Owen could walk to it...  it had a hot tub, a huge deck... great yard etc.. etc..

After looking at this and several other properties, we came back and negotiated an offer and were quickly approved and granted the lease.  Shortly after, I met the owners, who were so happy that a family was going to take care of their house rather than interim tenants.  Randomly, I had decided to sell my car back in Pennsylvania and I had seen a Mini Cooper S in the driveway when we viewed the house.  I inquired about it and yes they were looking to sell... so we struck a deal on the car.  They also introduced us to some friends of theirs who were a great help as we moved up here.  During this all, we had a good laugh about how we were going to step in and assume their life.

Several friends and family have inquired just exactly where we are at in Vancouver...  So if you look at the map below, you can see Vancouver itself is a peninsula.  The actual metro downtown area is directly north of the "Vancouver" text on the map.  We are inside the red square, which is east of the city about 12 miles. So jump down to the next map for a close-up view..

The house has a Port Moody address, but we are more or less on the borders of Port Moody, Coquitlam and Burnaby.  Burnaby mountain is between us, and Simon Frasier University is on top of that mountain.  We are close to pretty much everything and are starting to develop a new reference where if it takes longer than 10 minutes to get where we want to go, it's a "long trip" :)