Real Estate Information and Market Trends| Real Estate Victoria BC

Real Estate On Vancouver Island

Is Real Estate on Vancouver Island getting to be to expensive for most people? We have seen some strong gains in Real Estate prices over the last 4-5 years. Where will the market go? This is not an easy question. Our very fuzzy crystal ball tells us Real Estate is still a very good investment.

What we base this on is, that we still have Oil prices of over $100 per barrel, everywhere we travel in Canada there are help wanted signs. The commercial building and construction is forging ahead in leaps and bounds. Looking at all these signs, it does not look as it will be much of a slow down.

The prices of residential real estate had to level off somewhat. Homes that are priced well and are well maintained sells quickly and for a great price. Victoria and Vancouver Island is still very affordable if you compare to other world class destinations. Looking at www.MLS.cain Vancouver you can get a 1940’s home with 1600 sqft for $1,068,000. In Victoria you still get a very nice and prestigious home for that kind of money.

There are parts of Vancouver Island that has become very “trendy” and one of those is the Tofino, is it becoming a playground for the rich and famous?. This is a question that is discussed in an article in the Times Colonist. It reads:

Tofino discovers the price of fame

The beach bums and old hippies, loggers and fishermen who gave Tofino its cachet have been priced out of town.

A woman is doing tai chi on Chesterman Beach. At least, I think it’s tai chi. She might just be trying to scratch her shoulder blades, for all I know. Doesn’t matter. Her motions are slow and fluid, and she looks lithe and hip and beautiful.

All the women in Tofino are lithe and hip and beautiful. So, for that matter, are the men. Ditto for the dogs.

The tourists? They just try to act like they’re from Tofino, but it never quite comes off, is a little too calculated. (“I’d like a large tai chi, miss.” “I believe that’s a chai tea, sir.”)

The question is whether Tofino itself has become a little too calculated, its legendary edge-of-the-world serenity so commodified that the village has become — eek! — Whistler-by-the-Water.

Well, no, it’s not there yet, but neither is it Vancouver Island’s secret Eden anymore. The fishermen and loggers are gone. Same for the stereotypical beach bums and old hippies, priced out of what was once a pauper’s paradise.

With multimillion-dollar, celebrity-studded beachfront properties, a groaning infrastructure and an ever- expanding international cachet, is Tofino just too damn gorgeous for its own good?

Tofino’s main drag, Campbell Street, is packed this time of year – if not at Government Street levels, then at least Cook Street Village, only with kayak rentals and a better view.

We even saw a frustrated driver lean on his horn at a congested intersection, a rare display of ill temper that was ignored by visitors but which sent the locals swooning. You wouldn’t hear horn-honking in winter.

Such is the seasonal contrast. “Go to the Co-op in the winter, you say ‘hi’ to all five people shopping because you know them all,” says 10-year resident Krissy Montgomery. In the summer, it’s so busy that the store might run out of bread.

Tofino is in the odd position of having to contend with its own prosperity. It’s the old conundrum: How many steps can you take in the wilderness before it’s not wilderness anymore? How many tourists can tromp over Tofino before it loses its authenticity?

The numbers might be down this season, but the village, with a wintertime population of maybe 1,600, usually gets buried in visitors come summer. Someone counted all the tourist beds – hotels, campgrounds, B&Bs – a couple of years ago, came up with 5,400. And everyone knows that a lot of two-room B&Bs rent out at least three or four rooms.

“We have two months of the year to make all our money for the other 10 months,” says Montgomery, manager of the Surf Sisters surfing school. They go from a handful of staff in the winter to two dozen in the summer. And that’s just Surf Sisters: Tofino has five surf schools, three main surf shops.

Surfing is a huge deal in Tofino, though you can forget about the old image of endless summers spent frolicking in the waves while living out of a Westfalia on the beach. Today’s surfers often work two jobs – if they can find somewhere to live.

Housing is tough for seasonal workers. “It’s a total scramble come springtime,” says Montgomery. Most jobs pay $12 to $17 an hour. A room in a shared house, if you can find one, typically rents for $500 a month, plus utilities. The resorts and other large employers buy houses for staff; a dreadlocked blond surfer from Chamonix, France, says he pays just $200 a month for a room in staff accommodation, a sum that will be refunded if he stays the whole season. Smaller employers can’t offer that sort  of deal. “Some girls live in vans,” says Montgomery.

That sort of thing makes Tofino sound like You Know Where, though Montgomery shakes her head. “It won’t ever be as crazy as Whistler.” The town, physically limited by the surrounding ocean and Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, can only grow so big.

But that scarcity of space drives up property prices, which in turn shapes development. Ground has been cleared for The Gateway, a three-storey commercial-residential development on Campbell Street. Across from St. Columba Church on Main Street, construction workers swarm over a waterfront project called The Shore, where a sign advises there are “a limited number of residential, commercial and exclusive penthouse suites still available.” The real estate scene was reviewed in the New York Times.

Tofino property prices have tripled in a decade. “A lot of young families are leaving because they don’t see a future where they can own property,” says Michael Tilitzky, a Tofino councillor and executive director of the chamber of commerce.

To really see the shift, go to the aforementioned Chesterman Beach, a few kilometres south of town. Barry and Barbara Campbell bought a beachfront lot for $30,000 in the 1970s, built a house and raised a family there. You can get a couple of million bucks for property like that today. You’ll also pay upward of $9,000 in property taxes, one of the reasons the Campbells sold the place a couple of years ago.

It wasn’t only the taxes that spurred the move, though. So many of Chesterman’s houses were sold to seasonal residents that there was no one around in winter. “It was becoming a ghost town,” says Barry, a retired park worker.

Cruising the beach now is like reading Who’s Who: This property belongs to NHL hockey player Brendan Morrison, that one to singer Sarah McLachlan. The star power at Chesterman’s was noted by a writer from Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this year: “A week earlier and we’d have been rubbing shoulders with Penelope Cruz, Sir Ben Kingsley and the paparazzi who’d come to photograph them.”

That’s cool in a Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous sort of way, but not much help when you’re looking to car-pool with the neighbours in February. So the Campbells moved into Tofino proper.

Barry Campbell is philosophical about Tofino’s upscale transition. The village has changed before, he says. It changed when the bottom fell out of the herring fishery, in which a kid could earn $20,000 in a single night. It changed when logging dried up. It changed when the hippies invaded in the 1970s, Vietnam draft dodgers settling into the bush. “It’s just a different invasion now.”

You don’t get the uncontrolled swarms of people spending their summers camping on the beach like in the old days. You do get people whose wallets drag on the ground. “The character has changed already. We aren’t long-haired kids eating brown rice anymore.”

The stage for Tofino’s transformation to a tourist mecca was set with the creation of the national park in 1972.

Then came the publicity that accompanied the environmental protests, first the fight to save Meares Island from logging in the early 1980s, then the War in the Woods over the Clayoquot in 1993. People saw those televised images of breathtaking natural beauty, started flocking to Tofino.

A federal sewer-and-water project in the mid-1980s allowed development to boom, gave those tourists somewhere to stay and stuff to do: fishing, then whale-watching, then kayaking, then surfing. What was a summer-only season expanded with the whale festival in spring, storm-watching in winter.

Tofino’s international reputation grew. Standing in line in the Common Loaf Bakery, Dutch tourist Johan Van Maurik says Tofino and Long Beach are well-known back home. They’re in that global class.

Now there’s culinary tourism. “When I first lived here there were two restaurants in town, and one was part laundromat,” says Campbell. Contrast that with today’s ultra-competitive foodie market. It might be theoretically possible to have a bad dining experience in Tofino, but you’ll have to work hard to do so.

 ”You can read the Globe and Mail and there’s an article on the cuisine of Tofino,” says Tilitzky. “You never would have got that a decade ago.”

That represents a subtle shift, he says. New businesses are interested in a range of economic opportunities, not just ecotourism ones.

Ain’t necessarily cheap though. We saw a couple of women blanch and wheel away from an eatery whose lunchtime window menu advertised a $14 clubhouse sandwich and vegetarian pasta for $24.

Those prices won’t faze the so-called NEO – new economic order – travellers over whom the marketing people salivate. They’re the kind of tourists who go “glamping,” or glamorous camping, with wilderness gourmet cooking, wine-tasting, remote beach surfing, river kayaking, that sort of thing. Premium NEOs are happy to pay top dollar for genuine, natural, cool experiences.

Which brings us back to that question of whether Tofino can retain its authenticity.

Nathan Fisk, a Victoria-based guide with the Midnight Sun adventure travel company, is familiar with places that adopt a storybook facade to sell to outsiders. Some parts of Victoria do that. So does Banff. “Even if you’re a tourist, you can get a sense if something is organic or if it’s been put up,” he says, while shepherding Van Maurik’s Dutch buddies through the bakery.

Tofino hasn’t lost itself yet, at least hasn’t seen the mom-and-pop shops overwhelmed by could-be-anywhere upmarket chain stores, Fisk says. “If it’s done right, it won’t become Whistler.” It is, however, pushing the envelope. Ucluelet, 40 kilometres to the south, has a more genuine feel. “I think Ukee has a chance to do it.”

Indeed, you’ll find plenty of visitors singing the praises of Ucluelet these days. It might have the reputation as being funky Tofino’s blue-collar-around-a-red-neck cousin, but the lack of affectation is a draw in itself. Janet and Peter Courtis, visiting from Buckinghamshire, England, said they preferred Ucluelet to Tofino. Less hustle and bustle. Easier access to quiet beaches. “It’s more relaxed here,” said Peter, looking down at Ucluelet’s Amphritite Point lighthouse.

Both Tofino and Ucluelet received “resort municipality” status from the province this year, allowing them to invest a two-per-cent hotel tax in infrastructure. Tofino expects to collect $3.5 million over five years, which it can then invest in pathways and other amenities that would otherwise be beyond a community with such a small population.

That’s good news for those who still flinch at the memory of August 2006, when the overburdened water system went dry. An expanded reservoir means that won’t happen again.

The water fiasco served as a reminder that despite its big-time reputation, Tofino is still a tiny town, with services to match. It might boom like a cannon in summer, but in winter reverts to being another remote, rain-soaked, tight-knit Vancouver Island community. No malls, no movie theatre and the 130-kilometre road to Port Alberni is a rodeo. If Tofino has no chain stores, it’s because there aren’t enough customers to support them in the dark months.

“It’s not an easy environment to live in year-round,” says Devo Reeves, standing at the coffee counter in Surf Sisters. The early European settlers, their heads filled with dreams of lovely English gardens, found that. “People came out and discovered the environment is cruel and harsh.”

That, along with Tofino’s physical limitations, could prove its salvation, says Reeves, who first came to the community about 15 years ago. “I think the thing that’s going to save us is our archaic infrastructure and the fact that we simply don’t have any land.”

And no matter what, there’s no avoiding the essential magic of the natural setting.

“The thing that brings people back is the sheer beauty of the place. That’s not going to change.” End of Article.

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Cheers,
Bill

Bill Ethier B.Sc – REALTOR®

Properties in Victoria Professionals- Royal LePage Coast Capital Realty

Bill has been a REALTOR® in Victoria since 2006. Originally from the Vancouver area, Bill moved to Victoria to attend the University of Victoria where he received his Bachelor of Science. Not only does Bill have a wealth of real estate knowledge he is also an active member of the community. He is a member of Triple Shot Cycling Club, Island Road Racers and is the Race Director for the Sooke River 10K.