housing
NOT BUYING THE FIRST-TIMER STORY?
The “true” first-time home buyer narrative is in the eye of the (be)holder of the data—some of which we’ll have to wait for.
With housing prices at all-time highs—and increasing faster than at almost any other time in our history—as supply struggles to be framed as anything but constrained, it’s natural to be concerned not only about peoples’ ability to move within the market (refer to the previous page for a brief discussion on that topic), but perhaps more so the ability of first-time home buyers to actually buy a home for the first time. But what does the data tell us? This may come as a surprise to some, but the number of first-time home buyers in Metro Vancouver has actually increased every year since the BCMinistry of Finance began publishing such data. Specifically, the 4,343 first-time home buyers in 2018 rose to 4,644 in 2019, to 5,114 in 2020, and further to 5,602 in 2021. This is pretty compelling evidence that despite rising prices and limited supply, first-time home buyers are finding ways to continue to get in on the action.
Of course, storylines are rarely so simple. When considered as a share of all transactions in Metro Vancouver, first-time home buyers in 2021 accounted for 6.8% of purchases, down from 8.8% in 2020, and 9.6% in 2019. So in some ways, you can latch on to the narrative that suits your needs best: that first-time home-buying activity is waning per its share of all sales, or that first-time home- buying activity is on the rise per the count of first-time home purchases. The reality is that we need more data to fully understand the real dynamic at play here. With this in mind you can bet we’ll be following the data through 2022 to see if that declining first-time home buyer share actually translates to waning first-time home buyer counts, as we saw in the latter half of 2021.
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