Boomtown number crunching

The Northern BC Real Estate Board has released its sales figures for the first five months of 2006 and Rupert has seen a pretty impressive increase in the value of housing in the last year.  The stats from the Realtors show that from May of 2005 to May of 2006 the value of an average home in Rupert has gone up 49,000 dollars.

Check out the entire survey below…

opinion250.com/blog/view/283 … rs+un-real!

I can’t believe how much most people are trying to sell their houses for in Prince Rupert.  There are old war-time houses, in very dire need of fixups, with asking prices of $65,000 plus; your every day run of the mill-nothing fancy going for $100,000 and the new and nicer homes going for almost $400,000… simply because of “the mighty container port.”

Looking at that webpage, Rupert hasn’t even had the most substantial increase in the average house price… 100 Mile is up over $70,000 a house average… THAT’S HUGE!

The market will always be driven by the buyer.  AS long as we are willing to pay the price, it will remain high.  Just look at the lower mainland.  Now thats insane!! 

Real estate prices are a very funny thing, here in kelowna prices are retarded and yet there are not really any jobs that pay enough to support them. You cant pick up a crackshack here for under 250K 
The average wage here is minimum wage so i see things crashing down soon.

Kelowna also has a huge retirey population… retired docters and dentists, ect… plus lots of rich people from Van city have summer homes in the Kelowna area.

I sold my house in Rupert in May 2005.  Before selling it, real estate people gave us a ball park figure that we thought was too low.  We decided to sell privatly first.  We put a price of  between $15 000 and $20 000 above the real estate advice just after the container port announcement. 
In the end, we got three offers above our asking price and sold for $10 000 more.  This was more than $25 000 above the real estate quote! 
This house is now on sale again.  The new owners are asking $40 000 more than what they paid after one year of ownership.  And, after looking at all the other houses on the MLS site for Rupert, I believe that the market value of that house has probably gone up at least $30 000 in a year so they are probably not overpricing it if you factor in the negotiations from the buyers and the real estate commission.
I should have listen to my friend who told me to ask more for my house!

Yeah, taxes have increased a bit too.  I hope they readjust the tax rate to take new property values into consideration.

It’s still going to crash; you cant tell me there are  enough retired people, and people buying summer homes to drive the real estate market as high as it is now.  Prices are way too high for this market and will either level off or come crashing down in the next few years.  Prince ruperts housing prices were very low so of course they’re going to go up. Now I’m off to bluey/kentucky-alleyne lakes to enjoy the sun  :sunglasses:

LOL, city hall readjusting, tax rates, oh my side, my side, too funny. Til the last drop of blood is taken that’s the credo on Third avenue… :imp:

Well in effect City Hall does adjust the tax rates … by adjusting the mill rate.  The taxes you pay are the assessed value of your property times the mill rate for each tax category.  City Hall sets the mill rate based upon the total tax revenue they need (want) for the coming year (so they take the total assessed value of all taxable property in the city and figure out a mill rate that when multiplied by that total assessed value will give them the tax revenue they want).  This year City Hall decided that they needed an increase in total tax revenue of 4.8% - but that is based upon the total assessed value of taxable property.  If your property increased in value by the average of 24% in Rupert, then your taxes should have increased only 4.8% … but if your property increased more than average you pay more taxes and if your property increased less than average you pay less taxes … and that is what happened with my property - increased 14% in assessed value so my taxes actually went down $92.  Rising assessed values are only a good thing if you plan to sell your house in the near future.

Ah, that explains it.  Thanks.

Is Mil / Mill rate the latin thing?  As in thousands of something? 

Geez I’ll have to put my university Latin skills to work.  Pretty sure you are right - at least it works out to be the mill rate per thousand dollars of assessed value - e.g on my property the assessed value is $111,100 and the general residential rate is 10.404620 for a general residential tax portion of $1,155.96 …