The Homeseekers: #2 Simon Bray

STORIES

Mar 31

The truth is that real estate isn’t easy or simple. But these journeys home are some of life's greatest adventures. These are the stories of some of our own CREW's real estate adventures, filled with the challenges and rewards that come when you cross uncharted waters.

Home is where you make it.

An adventure through the craziest feeding frenzy of a real estate market I have ever seen anywhere in the world.

We hadn’t intended to move house, let alone countries. We’d just finished renovating a great little beach house on an acre of natural coastal forest. We’d also just welcomed our son to the world, and his young life had turned ours upside down (as is their speciality). But we chose to go, inspired by the new experiences, fresh perspectives and business opportunities.

We left Umdloti (a little beach town on the east coast of South Africa) for Madrid with as much as our baggage allowance would permit (not much, as it turns out). Arriving in Spain, we were at once wrapped up in the warmth and hospitality of an incredible culture - we were foreigners for sure, but we were amongst friends.

Qué?

Searching for a home was a totally new experience. I had no frame of reference, no familiarity or neighbourhood connection beyond where I needed to be for work. I didn’t understand the language, let alone the tenancy laws. I worked with a great rental agent and we saw upwards of fifteen houses in two days. One of them, a newly-finished townhome with more bedrooms than we needed but none of the furnishings we required, was perfect.

Funny how the list of “requirements” often goes out the window when you start actually viewing listings. We loved our time in that home. By the end of it, I had an honorary doctorate in flat-pack assembly.

We soon got the itch to buy a home and for about four months we searched on portals, viewed properties and bugged our bank for financing options. Then the winds shifted - again. We were on the move, either to Barcelona or to an exciting new horizon on the far west coast of British Columbia. It was a tough career decision and an even tougher personal one, having just built relationships and connections with Spain.

A somewhat chilly reception.

Arriving in Vancouver in February was a little different from the climate we’d grown accustomed to. And that was only the start of the novelty. Housing in Vancouver was almost impossible to find. Nothing seemed to be available, and when they did pop up, it was for a couple days and then gone.

We got lucky (as much as it pains me to say it, “Thank you, Craigslist.”) and found a cute, new house to rent in North Van. We moved in on March 11, 2020… yes, a couple of days before the first lockdown.

And that was that. Beyond walking the dog, we remained in that house - and only in that house - for pretty much six months. We’d been “on the road” for a while by then and I think that stint through the early part of the pandemic - as for many people - gave us a heightened desire to get our own place.

And so we become homeseekers again.

A dumb idea.

I won’t bore you with the details of our immigration and visa story, but suffice to say we were caught on the wrong side of the Foreign Buyers’ Tax, a dispensation that I really do think is flawed from the start. Now, I fully support the idea of a balanced real estate market, but the correct answer is surely more homes being built, not more restrictions on the tax-paying residents buying them? Prejudicing skilled immigrants and effectively shutting them out of the market is not the answer - aligning effective housing delivery to meet those immigration targets is.

One thing Foreign Buyers’ Tax definitely did do was to open up our search radius - I can tell you plenty about markets like Squamish, Bowen Island and Sunshine Coast thanks to that little bit of legislation.

Foreign Buyers’ Tax attempts to curtail foreign investment in real estate from overheating an already crazy real estate market in BC’s metro regions. The problem with that narrative is that it misses the key driver of future economic growth for those same metros: skilled immigration. I’m not suggesting that foreign money can't distort a local real estate market, I’m just pointing out that skilled immigrants (often employed by BC-based companies and certainly paying tax in BC) are not what we should consider as ‘foreign money’. My personal experience of this was very confusing: after a thorough vetting process we were granted a working visa and welcomed into Canada, only to find out that we couldn’t buy a home without paying an extraordinary 20% of the property value in tax. We then waited and watched as the market climbed to incredible new heights (fuelled exclusively by local buyers). Oh, the irony.

One thing Foreign Buyers’ Tax definitely did do was to open up our search radius - I can tell you plenty about markets like Squamish, Bowen Island and Sunshine Coast thanks to that little bit of legislation.

REW.ca was awesome. I was addicted to the platform. I immersed myself in all the listings and neighbourhoods, evaluating as many options as I could. We had an incredible realtor too, Rik De Voest (a fellow countryman who met us when his wife overheard our flat, South African accents in a park one day).

We viewed a good few homes up and down the North Shore - even some as far afield as Delta. We made offers on a few, breathing a sigh of relief when some of the more speculative offers fell through, cursing when the ones we wanted got away from us. It was (and still is) the craziest feeding frenzy of a real estate market I have ever seen anywhere in the world.

But it’s also home.

But, if it’s meant to be… there was a great listing that popped up, in a neighbourhood we’d recently fallen in love with, and there appeared the tiniest window in the market in mid-summer 2021, when it felt like everyone took a collective breath. We closed on a property.

We’d finally found a house we could call home again.

One thing I took from the experience is just how competitive it is out there, and crazy, out-of-whack expensive relative to other global cities. We desperately need to build more houses in Vancouver, and across the major cities in BC. Stories of people moving from far off places to build lives and contribute to communities are plentiful. I believe that more than fifty thousand “immigrants” like me will join us here this year, and next, and the next. We have to work together to welcome them and make a worthwhile place for all of us to live together well.