President's Message: Swimming upstream in a media frenzy
Media scrutiny of our profession remains intense. While your Board is talking with reporters daily, it can be difficult to stem the tide when some members are feeding the media frenzy.
I began my term as your president about a week ago. In my first 24 hours on the job I did 15 media interviews.
We’ve repeated our commitment many times in public that if a REALTOR® is found doing anything wrong, we want to know and we’ll vigorously investigate.
Some aspects of our media work are visible to you and others aren’t.
We’re working hard to ensure your voice is represented in the media and to correct inaccuracies in the coverage.
Instances of members sharing MLS® codes with the media and leaking information about their competitors further complicates this work. Sharing your MLS® log-in information is in breach of your professional responsibilities. It undermines the security and integrity of your MLS® system.
If you have issues you believe need addressing, I urge you to file a formal complaint with us and/or the Real Estate Council of BC. That approach best serves the public and the reputation of your profession. Refrain from using the “off the record” back channels offered by the media.
Rising home prices have created an emotional climate. Tapping into this, some in the media are focused on placing blame. They’re pointing to wealthy foreign investors, assignment agreements, or new immigrants evading taxes as the root causes of today’s affordability issues.
I’m not suggesting that these aren’t issues. However, at the heart of the affordability question is the fact that more people want to live here than there are homes available. This causes prices to rise.
The obvious solution would be to create more supply, but we're constrained by mountains to the north, an ocean to the west, and a border to the south. Couple this with a decreasing supply of detached homes as growth strategies focus on density.
Our region's affordability challenges are complicated and can’t be solved by a single solution. Ask residents of London, New York, or San Francisco whether they’ve found easy answers to rising home prices.
Some in the media want to simplify this complicated issue. As a result, we routinely see information reported that’s either inaccurate or out of context.
Here are some examples:
- A financial analyst with National Bank of Canada recently reported that wealthy Chinese investors purchased one-third of Metro Vancouver real estate in 2015. He reached this conclusion after reviewing a survey of 77 Chinese investors in which 9 respondents said they’ve purchased real estate in our region. He then applied a convoluted, “back of an envelope”, calculation that led to the statement that Chinese investors were involved in one-third of all home sale activity in our region last year.
- A March 19 cover article in the Vancouver Sun listed the “top 10 most lucrative house flips.” Our analysis through the MLS® system found that seven of these ten homes were not “flipped,” but instead rebuilt and re-sold. In some cases, a laneway house was also added to the property. The implication that these homes were re-sold as-is for a quick profit was misleading. To the Sun’s credit, they published our letter that highlighted these issues.
- Media have continuously cited an August 2015 report from a real estate company that stated that 70 per cent of home sales above $3 million in Vancouver were sold to people with ties to Mainland China in the previous year. What’s missing from this reporting is the fact that sales above $3 million accounted for just five per cent of all Vancouver home sales in 2014 and that 29 per cent of the City of Vancouver’s population declared themselves ethnic Chinese in the 2011 census.
When information surfaces that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, it gets little attention. For example:
- We've heard many theories about empty homes compounding housing affordability problems in Vancouver. When the City of Vancouver’s report on housing occupancy found no change in the percentage of empty homes in Vancouver since 2002, we received zero calls from the media for comment.
References: http://www.rebgv.ca/content/rebgv/en/newsletter/realtor-news-april-06-2016.html
