Today I noticed an article in a newspaper website, asking the question, what type of home one could buy for a certain amount....
This article explored how far away from Vancouver one would have to move to find your dream home, a cute concept but not really very realistic for most of us that are "connected"  to our  Greater Victoria Community in one way or another.


However, this question got me thinking about a slightly different twist to this Concept;

So I asked myself:
How many homes are there available in Greater Victoria within a Monthly Mortgage Payment  Budget Range?

We hear so often that Greater Victoria is so expensive to buy a "home", so I wanted to explore this a bit just for some summer fun.

Here are some average Greater Victoria rental rates to put things in context, CMHC reports average rental rates for a one bedroom apartment at $ 835 per month and for a 2 bedroom @ $ 1055 for 2011.   Rental rates for Single family homes are a bit harder to figure out, but a 1,000 to 1,500 square foot single family home is likely to rent from $ 1,500 to $ 2,500 dependent on location, age and condition. $ 3,000 should rent you a nice home in a nice location....

When you realize that renting at thees types of rates, it is no real surprise that some people say....... May be it is time to think about buying a Home....Obviously you need to Talk To Peter about that, right.

Back to our Little mid Summer Greater Victoria Housing Affordability Exercise;
For our example exercise we used the following criteria:

• A 10% Down payment,
• Legal, insurance, purchase and moving costs have been ignored (but use up to 3-5% if you want to get serious with this exercise)
• We used a fixed rate 5 year term mortgage source we found on line at 2.99% (we rounded it to 3%) with a 25 year amortization.
• This type of mortgage requires payments of approx. $ 473.21 per month for each $ 100,000 borrowed (or $ 4.73 per $1,000 borrowed).
• As for the property results we only searched for available properties in the Greater Victoria Area (excluding Malahat going North, & the Smaller Islands)
• I did NOT include  any time shares, leasehold interests or other less common ownership forms (not do discriminate against them) Just to keep the information as you would expect it to be.

We searched for  home options in  Victoria, Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Langford, Highlands, Colwood, Methchosin, Sooke, Central Saanich North Saanich and Sidney BC and included all their sub-areas.
Here is the Table of our Findings, and Trust me I was very pleasantly surprised, I hope you are as well.

So in Conclusion,
When people say, Greater Victoria is not very affordable, may be you want to do a little reality check..... It is not all that bad, when there are over 450 Greater Victoria home option properties for sale with monthly mortgage payments below $ 1,000 per month, you are likely better of buying than renting....

I think many people have been assuming that renting is cheaper than buying for some time, but where there are over 440 single family homes for sale in Greater Victoria with monthly payments below rental payments for a similar home, one could make a valid argument that the time to buy may have come.