Barbara Yaffe: Real estate market mayhem comes to Squamish

Ninety minutes. That’s all the time it took earlier this month for buyers to snap up every last one of ParkHouse Squamish Ltd.’s 65 pre-sale condo units.

Squamish, it appears, is just close enough to Vancouver to fall victim to the region’s property mayhem.

The condo units, priced from $167,000 to $450,000, are located in a four-storey, wood-frame building in the downtown area.

Not only does Squamish, with a population of 17,500, offer detached homes selling for less than $1 million, but the 2010 upgrade to the Sea to Sky Highway shaved 10 minutes from the commute into downtown Vancouver, now about 45 minutes. That is about the same driving time as for residents of Maple Ridge, Surrey or Abbotsford.

And people have noticed.

Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis will inevitably force more homebuyers to look further afield for housing. While the real estate industry dismisses the price challenge as being confined to the single-family home market, that still accounts for 54 per cent of all residential properties in the Vancouver region, according to recent research by Central 1 Credit Union.

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