The Burnaby real estate market is still hot right now and new data reveal more about who owns properties in the city.
According to the latest numbers released by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV), April saw home sales total 4,908 throughout the region, marking a 342.6% rise compared to just 1,109 sales during the same month in 2020.
When it comes to Burnaby, the city saw 337 detached houses listed, 183 attached listed and 491 apartment listings. The REGBV says 160 detached dwellings sold in Burnaby in April, while attached housing recorded 124 sales. There were also 371 apartment listings bought.
Aside from that data are numbers that show many Burnaby residents own more than one property.
More than 17% of property owners in Burnaby own multiple properties, according to SFU City Program’s Andy Yan, who analyzed data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program.
Out of that 17%, 13.1% own two properties, 2.9% own three properties and 1.4% own four or more properties.
“It’s also a story of wealth and really how residential property is a part of people's wealth,” Yan told Glacier Media. “It follows the geography of wealth in metropolitan Vancouver.”
The statistics don’t show where those multiple properties are, said Yan, or whether those properties are vacation homes or investments.
But it does raise interesting questions, he said.
“It does go into the idea of what does it mean to own residential property,” he said. “Knowing the kind of struggles we know many, many people have looking to buy their first home when we have a proportion of the population that has two or three or four homes or more.”
In Metro Vancouver as a whole, 16.4% of owners owned multiple properties.
- With additional reporting by Jane Seyd
