This sent on to me by one of my most loyal researchers, who makes sure I know always what’s happening in the rest of the world.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/01/rich-overseas-investors-uk-eu-housing-market

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Radical plans to stop rich overseas residents who live outside the EU buying British houses – as well as tight restrictions on them acquiring “newbuild” properties as investments – will be published in a report by a leading rightwing thinktank on Monday.

Free-market organisation Civitas castigates government ministers for allowing wealthy foreign investors to stoke a property boom that it says is driving up prices and locking millions of UK citizens out of the housing market.

The plans would prevent the likes of Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club, or other Russian oligarchs from adding to their multimillion-pound UK portfolios. They also aim to stem a flood of investment from countries such as China, Malaysia and Singapore.

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Many thanks to Andy Yan, number-cruncher and city analyst par excellence, for this map and story. Andy scraped or whatever all the data about property assessment changes between 2014 and 2013 and put it on a map. Look really closely and you can see what happened on your block.

The map tells the tale of where the biggest property-value spikes are — hope you can get to the link, as I can reprint the copy okay but the map is kind of teeny on my site.

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Someone just sent me this interesting story about the free-transit experiment in Estonia.

A new report just out from Avison Young on commercial leasing, with interesting news on vacancy rates throughout the region. Surrey saw a significant decline in leased space, with downtown Vancouver’s vacancy rate also climbing. With new construction about to come on board factored in, Avison calculates that the downtown vacancy rate is around 9 per cent (though sounds more like tenants reducing the amount of space they want than outright closures).

All very interesting, as I like to say, considering the big groundbreaking for The Exchange tower by Credit Suisse (attended by our very own mayor) this week, a building that has yet to find tenants, and the Manulife tower going up at Howe and Nelson, also with no announced tenants yet.

A couple paragraphs from the Avison news release.

Downtown (-270,560) led Metro Vancouver submarkets in terms of total negative absorption from January 1 to December 31, 2013, while Surrey (-137,809) registered its greatest amount of negative annual absorption since Avison Young started tracking the market in 1997. Richmond and New Westminster both recorded in excess of 165,000 sf of positive annual absorption and, with moderate demand in Yaletown and on the North Shore, were able to mitigate flat or weaker demand in the region.
At year-end 2013, vacancy in Metro Vancouver climbed to 7.8% from 7% 12 months earlier, the highest vacancy since year-end 2010. Downtown vacancy rose to 5.7% from 3.9% at year-end 2012, the highest vacancy registered since 2005. Vacancy in two of the three submarkets that comprise Vancouver proper – Downtown and Broadway (Yaletown is the other) – rose compared with 12 months earlier, but still remained tight when compared with other Canadian and U.S. metropolitan office vacancy rates.

I came across something recently that resonated, given the propensity of this council to make decisions quickly in the interest of achieving goals the mayor and his party set out for themselves. (Think: bike lanes, transitional housing, intervention into tanker issues, etc.)

This article, written about L.A.’s efforts to get a bike-share program, looks at the upside and downside of going with a lengthy public-participation process before decisions are made.

As news of Bixi’s request for bankruptcy protection washed across North America this week, there was a lot of bike-share angst. Also, confusion. A lot of people think that Bixi = bike-share, so therefore if Bixi if having troubles, bike-share everywhere must be doomed to failure.

I note that B-Cycle (currently operating in 21 cities) felt obliged to post this statement on its website:

While all of us at B-cycle regret the unfortunate news that PBSC has filed for bankruptcy we feel it is important to note that this occurrence is not an indication of the future of bike share. B-cycle has implemented successful bike share systems in 30 locations in both North and South America and continues to work with a growing number of cities looking for more sustainable transportation options, most recently installing systems in Santiago, Chile and Austin, Texas. Largely owned by Trek Bicycle, one of the world’s most successful bicycle companies, B-cycle is financially stable and operates under a fiscally responsible business model that delivers results for all of our systems. We believe the future of bike share is bright and look forward to bringing sustainable transportation to more of the world for years to come.

Back here in Vancouver, the Bixi mess was a reminder that there WERE other bidders interested in providing a bike-share system for Vancouver. Six expressed interest when the city called for proposals back in 2011 (not last year, as I mistakenly said). One was a local consortium that included a Richmond company that is doing bike-share hardware for Miami Beach, Oklahoma, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, among other places.

I did a story for the Globe yesterday that explored what might happen next a little.

This morning, I also got a message from another person unhappy about Vancouver’s commitment to what seems like a floundering Alta deal.

His comments:

In the nearly three years since this RFEOI was released, much has changed with the bike share industry, as you might expect with any nascent industry, especially one that is effectively technological in nature.

The City of Vancouver continues to negotiate exclusively with Alta behind a curtain — there is no contract, only a continued commitment by the City to negotiate exclusively. If the City has wants to implement a bike share program it should be done openly and transparently, to the benefit of the city and its citizens. It is time for the City to re-open the bidding process.

City design competition to come up with this year’s ideas for public playspace on Robson between the art gallery and courthouse now open. Entry form is here.

First off, this decision is about an old-style ownership model for jointly owned properties, the fractional-interest model. So it’s not an exact equivalent of the strata ownership that prevails legally and everywhere else today.

But this decision that I wrote about today is interesting because it shows the kinds of issues that are arising when many, many owners in a jointly held property (like a strata) have to decide whether to keep investing or to sell as buildings age.

With a huge and increasing number of people living in strata-owned property in the Lower Mainland, the law on how you decide to dissolve your union is going to come under more and more scrutiny. There’ll be more on this throughout the year, thanks to a B.C. Law Institute initiative.

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This just out from the Surrey Board of Trade, who don’t sound like happy campers

The Surrey Board of Trade wants the Transit Referendum question now.

“I’ve called the Ministry of Transportation today and they indicated that there was no timeline on when the transit referendum question will be ready. I’ve written a letter asking for the question to be ready now,” said Anita Huberman, CEO, Surrey Board of Trade

Transportation is a very complex subject especially in Metro Vancouver. Even though the vote is not taking place until November 2014, time is needed to educate the public, and in our case, the business community of Surrey. Other referendum campaigns have had multi-year campaigns because transportation and transit systems are a complex subject to educate the populous.

We need the question now – and we need, finally, a solution that will benefit all of Metro Vancouver – and not compromise growing cities like Surrey. Surrey will be the largest city in BC, and yet our transit and transportation systems simply do not meet current and future economic demand. This puts our economic future at risk. This referendum will have far-reaching and even unforeseen impacts. This is an issue that can’t be politicized. Businesses – in terms of the efficient movement of goods and people – are at risk.

The problems in staging this ‘let’s wing it’ referendum just keep going on and on. The latest.

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