Vancouver housing market trends: 1 - Building Age and In-suite Laundry

As an interlude to my posts on electronics, I decided to apply my engineering skills to solving an interesting real-world problem: how to buy the optimal house for the optimal price. From an economics standpoint, this seemed quite straightforward: I planned to use the idea of unequal value to obtain a house that no one else would want, at a price that I liked. For example, if everyone else cares about pets, making buildings that allow pets more expensive than others, then I would pick a building with no pets and therefore save some money while still keeping the other criteria (like in-suite laundry) that are important to me.

My thought process was originally something like this:
1 - Obtain data on all the houses and apartments in Vancouver
2 - Determine the principle driving factors of prices to make a simple linear equation representing the price of a house as the sum of all its components
3 - Find the home with the criteria important to me, at a price I like

But alas, no one publishes tables of data that I could use. So my actual process looked something like this:

1 - Choose a small neighbourhood (in my case Mt Pleasant, Vancouver, Canada)
2 - Digitize all the data from houses currently for sale from my local MLS into an excel chart
3 - Identify driving forces using excel graphs

And in the end, I still don't have a great understanding of what people are paying for in a house. But I did make a couple interesting observations: the first one being house age and presence of in suite laundry.

First: the data set I used (sorted by asking price):

Listing	Price (April 19)	Sq feet	Laundry	Maintenance	Built	Walkscore
V1052669	$169,900.00	530	1	$224.73	1988	90
V1051480	$188,000.00	560	1	$203.38	1993	75
V1040689	$198,500.00	604	0	$220.00	1980	75
V1044617	$209,000.00	434	0	$162.67	1982	98
V1048130	$220,000.00	560	1	$216.73	1993	75
V1044627	$228,000.00	615	0	$210.95	1977	77
V1050003	$229,000.00	442	1	$153.08	1982	98
V1040699	$229,900.00	560	1	$212.00	1993	75
V1043115	$235,000.00	446	1	$185.08	1994	75
V1050473	$239,000.00	603	0	$244.72	1965	85
V1057152	$239,000.00	656	0	$283.62	1976	100
V1049518	$239,000.00	629	0	$195.05	1984	78
V1055063	$239,900.00	553	0	$258.00	1975	100
V1059296	$243,000.00	602	1	$224.02	1994	75
V1055712	$249,000.00	630	0	$245.93	1972	100
V1048892	$249,900.00	625	0	$270.00	1975	92
V1054910	$252,000.00	502	1	$220.90	1996	98
V1043052	$258,000.00	638	0	$215.91	1973	100
V1047691	$259,000.00	724	0	$255.66	1980	75
V1054803	$265,000.00	557	0	$195.58	1983	90
V1058317	$269,000.00	695	0	$296.35	1974	88
V1047831	$279,000.00	527	0	$258.00	1976	100
V1050340	$279,900.00	552	0	$215.45	1970	92

When I plot the presence of in-suite laundry and age, I got a figure like this:

Fig 1. In-suite laundry as a function of the year the apartment was built

It seems to me that if you care about having in-suite laundry, you can start by looking at the building's age (which is sometimes easier to tell from the ad). My guess is that older buildings do not have the sewer system in place to support in-suite laundry, while newer buildings do. 

Some other trends I looked at were: 

• Maintenance fees and square-footage, 
• Age of building and maintenance fees, and 
• Walk score and housing valuation.

All of which I will discuss in upcoming posts. If it is successful, I may adapt this to other neighbourhoods, as well as try to find a more automated way of processing the data (right now it is quite manual).

For reference, there are a number of useful sites if you are trying to do some house finding analysis of your own: here are a few that I used:

http://vancouverpricedrop.wordpress.com/ - an interesting study of house listings over time, with 'desperation scores'. This author is putting effort into bringing transparency into the market which I applaud.

http://evaluebc.bcassessment.ca/ - Here is where I obtained appraised values for each house I was looking at (though I didn't find it so useful in my analysis)

http://vancouver.ca/your-government/vanmap.aspx - This is a very interesting map of Vancouver showing a number of useful data sets, though unfortunately not evaluations

http://www.geoweb.dnv.org/applications/propertiesapp/ - And this is the type of transparency I wish Vancouver offered: a map overlaid with property values. Good job North Vancouver!