Triple Crown

We are seeing three categories of people purchasing our condominiums right now: young professionals looking for less expensive entrance into the competitive housing market; retirees downsizing from a big family home; and investors who want to buy a unit and rent it out to make a profit over time. Quite a few real estate investors make a purchase at Triple Crown. That’s because real estate investors are catching on to the advantages of condo pre-sales, especially as the price of single detached dwellings skyrocket and become less financially tenable. More Time to Save the Down Payment The advantage of buying a pre-sales or pre-construction condo as a real estate investment is the flexible financial arrangement. If this is your first-time real estate investment, it’s difficult to come up with the required 20 per cent down payment. As of February 2018, the Victoria Real Estate Board (VREB) lists the benchmark price for condominiums in the Greater Victoria area as $463,100...

The NDP budget includes a 30-point housing plan that is designed to stabilize the housing market. This plan outlines a new speculation tax on people who own empty homes but pay no income taxes in B.C., expands the current transfer tax and foreign buyers' tax, and cuts a loan program for first-time buyers. Finance Minister Carole James said she hopes this and other changes will cool real estate costs, but would not predict how much, or what will happen if they take a bigger bite out of housing values than intended. "We are treading on new ground," she says. Speculation Tax Part of the plan includes a new levy, or "speculation tax," which will be applied to more than 15,000 residential properties in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, the regions of Victoria and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and Kelowna. The tax rate, charged on a property's assessed value, will be 0.5 per cent in 2018, and then 2 per cent in the following years. This means if a...