For those who don’t know, we used to live in Vancouver area, British Columbia, for a couple of years. We bought a town-house there about 3 years ago. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay longer because of the recession. I almost lost my job because my company was in trouble. We had to move to Ontario where the jobs are.

Although we move to Ontario, we still keep our town-house. The property market in Vancouver area was really bad when we left. We didn’t want to sell it below our purchase price. So, we decided to rent it out.

A couple of days ago, we received an assessment letter from BC Assessment. Our town-house is assessed with the value of $336,000. It is far below our purchase price, $382,000. We were a little bit shocked for a moment. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Canadian housing price seems to have recovered from its low.

Then, we checked MLS listing to see if any of our neighbours are selling their houses. Yes…, there is one neighbour who is selling their house. Their model is pretty much the same to ours. Their assessment value is also the same to ours. Guess what, they’re listing it for $469.000! We had another shock. Why is it far above our purchase price now?

We checked another source of data, i.e. Plunge-O-Meter. The chart below shows the average house price in Vancouver area since 1999. As you can see, there is a significant dip in late 2008 and early 2009. Then the market recovered quickly starting in mid-2009 to continue its long-term trend, moving even higher.

It makes more sense now. BC Assessment assessed our property value on July 1, 2009. This is where the market is bottoming. Since then, the price has gone up significantly, it’s now even higher than the previous peak in early 2008.