Feature Stories
House of Blues
By Jennifer Van Evra published May 1, 2009
Real-estate agents are rediscovering the joys of family and silent phones
Rod MacKay pulls his cellphone out of his jacket pocket and checks the time. The veteran Vancouver realtor is standing outside a condo in Kits, waiting to show the two-bedroom-and-den to a Coquitlam couple and their realtor. They’re late—by more than 20 minutes—but he waits. Another person was supposed to come through but cancelled at the last minute. Two days ago, MacKay dropped the asking price by $20,000, to $439,900. When the unit hit the market last July, just before the economic hurricane, it was $499,900—a steal at the time.
A year ago, this scene would have been decidedly different. Shoes would have crowded the doorway. Buyers who cancelled appointments did so at their peril, because the first showings were often the last. Then, last October, realtors’ BlackBerries fell silent.
“Industry-wide, we all kept looking at them to see if they were on Silent or Vibrate,” MacKay says. “I thought mine was broken.”
They would have rung, had anyone cared to dial them. At one of the highest points in the market, in May 2007, 4,331 properties were sold in Metro Vancouver. Eighteen months later, that number was just 762. Between February 2008 and February 2009, home prices fell an average of 13.5 percent.
For agents, the numbers are even more sobering. On the West Side, there are over 2,700 realtors; in December and January combined, a total of 382 properties sold. That’s a sale for one agent in seven, and a paycheque of zero for the rest. One of MacKay’s more successful colleagues admitted that he hasn’t sold a single property since September; another is now pouring espressos at a local coffee chain.
