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House prices plummeting

There may not be a better time to buy a home in the Lower Mainland.

According to CTV Vancouver, listings for a single detached family home are falling below the $1.5 million paid in the Metro Vancouver area a month ago.

CTV says it found homes in East Vancouver priced below $1 million. One home sold for $560,000 below the original asking price.

The home was listed in August at $1.36 million, but sold last month for $800,000.

"If you want to sell, you have to be priced sharply, and you see a lot of price drops, said Dave Hutchinson, a realtor with Sutton West Coast.

He says one home in West Vancouver was listed at $3.6 million. The price was lowered a little at a time and, eventually sold at nearly $1 million below the original price.

"There's not this crazy deluge of offers coming in like before, when you could price it below the market value and wait for all the offers to come in. That's not happening anymore," Hutchinson said.

"Buyers are being a little more picky now and you didn't see that before."

That same trend is being noticed by Tom Davidoff, an associate professor at UBC's Sauder School of Business.

"Sales have been slow and we're starting to see prices tick down," he said.

"I think we can say the market is facing very significant headwinds. We have the foreign buyers tax hitting an important part of the market. We've got new qualification rules for mortgages coming down for lower-end buyers."

                                                                                                       --with files from CTV Vancouver



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