Hello,
My name is Eric. I have been living in Canada since 1998 and I’m now a Canadian citizen. My background is in science. I have a PhD from UBC in chemistry, and currently work at a Biotech doing research. Living in Vancouver it is unavoidable to talk about real estate. Everybody has an opinion about the housing market. It’s almost like the weather, a topic of conversation among friends, colleagues and even strangers. However, I’ve found that most opinions are based on anecdotal observations and are not sustained by facts or numbers. My goal is to correct this by providing facts and numbers that allow us to form informed opinions and consequently make more informed choices.
When I came to the city as a student in 2002, I rented. Once I got a job in 2010, I bought a townhouse. My wife and I were able to pay off our mortgage in 6.5 years, something of which we were proud of. In early 2018, I started researching more carefully the real estate market in Vancouver, and came to the conclusion that it was very risky remain in the market. There is a lot of evidence of speculation and the real estate market has many hallmarks of an asset bubble. We therefore decided to sell our property and go back to renting.
In this blog, I want to share some of the research I have done that led me to this conclusion, and at the same time I hope to share some of my observations about the current status of Vancouver’s Real Estate. I also have invested the proceedings of our townhouse in a diversified portfolio of index funds. Over the last few years, investing has become a hobby of mine. After reading many books and having invested for a few years, I hope to share some of the principles of investing so that my fellow Canadians learn that there are other ways of growing your wealth besides owning a house.
