Dmitri and Valerie Dudchenko Real Estate Services

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Real Estate Stats
Блог новостей недвижимости Ванкувера.
Тенденции рынка. Статистика. Аналитика. Жилая недвижимость. Коммерческая недвижимость. Налоги и гранты при покупке жилья. Информация для новых иммигрантов.

09/17/2026

✨ 5 BEDROOMS + SUITE + SAUNA ✨ Beautifully renovated and tucked away on a quiet family-friendly cul-de-sac. Space, style, flexibility, and an exceptional location - all in one home🏠

Market Meter, August 16 – September 15, 2026. Mid-month results. Sales-to-Active.Detached: seven of eight municipalities...
09/16/2026

Market Meter, August 16 – September 15, 2026. Mid-month results. Sales-to-Active.
Detached: seven of eight municipalities are below 12%. Vancouver eased the most, from 10.1% to 7.5%, with 101 of its 1,349 active listings sold over 30 days. Port Coquitlam stands out: 25 of 150 active listings sold, or 16.7%, up from 7.7% in early August. West Vancouver is the lowest at 5.6%.
Townhouses and duplex: Coquitlam leads, with 46 of 232 active listings sold, or 19.8%. Port Coquitlam, the early-August leader at 29.2%, has come down to 15.6%. Burnaby is the slowest at 6.9%, after 16.2%, with 23 of 335 active listings sold. West Vancouver is a very small market, 6 sales on 45 active listings (13.3%), so we draw no conclusions from it.
Apartments: Port Coquitlam sits right on the seller's line, with 24 of 120 active listings sold, or 20.0%. Port Moody follows at 16.9%. The other six cities sit in a narrow band from 9.2% to 11.4%.
The full September picture comes on October 1.
Historically, prices tend to face downward pressure when the ratio stays below 12% for a long stretch, and upward pressure when it climbs above 20%.
Thinking of making a move? Let's talk strategy.
Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · 604 961 6413
Valeriya Dudchenko REALTOR® · 778 892 4462
[email protected]
Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

FROM ARCHIVE: the money that built this cabaret came from liquor, and it could not sell liquor until 1970This is the Com...
09/16/2026

FROM ARCHIVE: the money that built this cabaret came from liquor, and it could not sell liquor until 1970

This is the Commodore two days before it opened. The floor is polished, the instruments are already set up, the tables are laid. The room is empty.

Henry Reifel started it. He came from Bavaria in 1888 and went into brewing. By the early 1920s the family owned breweries and a distillery.

Then the United States brought in Prohibition. Canadian liquor went south, and the Reifels set up Consolidated Exporters to move it. Ships left carrying paperwork for Mexico and Central America. The cargo changed hands in international waters off the American coast, and fast motorboats ran it ashore at night.

In 1934 American authorities sued Henry and George Reifel over $10 million of smuggled alcohol and $7.25 million in unpaid duty. Per Changing Vancouver, they dropped the case a year later, after a $500,000 fine and $200,000 of forfeited bail. The family had already sold the breweries by then.

The money came home and went into land. Vested Estates, Harry Reifel's company, did the buying. In fourteen months across 1928 and 1929 it took at least 14 lots on Granville Street, and put more than $1,115,000 into buildings on them. By 1931 the family held nineteen lots between Robson and Nelson.

George Conrad Reifel put the cabaret on the second floor, and he put it there because his wife wanted it. Alma Reifel thought the city needed another ballroom besides the crowded one at the Hotel Vancouver. The architect, H.H. Gillingham, did not live to see it finished, and his son Bruce completed it. They laid the dance floor over tires packed with horsehair, which is why it gives under your feet.

The Commodore Cabaret opened on the evening of 3 December 1930. Four months later it closed. The Depression had arrived, and it reopened only in 1931, under different men, Nick Kogas and Johnny Dillias.

The Commodore did not get a liquor licence until 1970. For forty years people brought their own.

The same money built George Reifel a house, Casa Mia on SW Marine Drive, and paid for the Vogue cinema up the street.

The cabaret is still open.

Sources: Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Places That Matter; Vancouver Heritage Site Finder; Commodore Ballroom; Changing Vancouver; City of Vancouver Archives.
Photo: "Interior of new cabaret - Commodore [at 872] Granville Street," 1 December 1930, AM1535-: CVA 99-3855, photographer Stuart Thomson. City of Vancouver Archives. Public domain.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

Кіплінг купив ділянку у Ванкувері, навіть не глянувши на неї.1889 рік. Він отримав 400 сосен, тонни граніту і трохи земл...
09/15/2026

Кіплінг купив ділянку у Ванкувері, навіть не глянувши на неї.

1889 рік. Він отримав 400 сосен, тонни граніту і трохи землі. А через три роки стало ще гірше.

Повна історія у групі «Нерухомість Ванкувера»:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1715583446313268/posts/1722177872320492/

FROM ARCHIVE: the beach carried his name until the railway took the land and the name with itA hundred years ago Kitsila...
09/09/2026

FROM ARCHIVE: the beach carried his name until the railway took the land and the name with it

A hundred years ago Kitsilano Beach was called Greer's Beach. The man whose name that was had been put off it.

Samuel Greer built a house right at the water on English Bay, and people started calling the place after him. Major Matthews, the city's first archivist, recorded only that he was a squatter who had put up a dwelling near the beach.

Then the land went to the Canadian Pacific Railway. The province handed the company about 6,000 acres for its terminus, and Greer's ground was inside it.

He would not leave. Laura Ishiguro, a historian at UBC, describes the next several years as both sides undermining each other: court cases, newspaper editorials, sabotage.

Then the house burned. The city archives hold a letter from J. Fred Sanders dated 4 August 1949. He remembers seeing a flat car and Sheriff Armstrong at the property, going off to a quarry, and coming back to ashes. Matthews added a note to the letter: the CPR officials had burned Greer's home and barn, which stood 100 feet west of the foot of Yew Street, beside the creek.

In September 1891 Greer fired and wounded a deputy sheriff. He was tried, convicted and sent to prison.

In the photograph, taken about 1898, twelve women in bathing costume are arranged on a beached log. The beach still carried his name.

And the railway needed a name. The CPR asked Jonathan Miller, the old Granville constable and Vancouver's first postmaster, for one for a new subdivision next to Greer's Beach. Miller went to Professor Charles Hill-Tout. Hill-Tout took the hereditary name of one of the chiefs of the Squamish people, Kates-ee-lan-ogh, and shortened it to Kates-ee-lano. Out of that came Kitsilano. All of it before July 1905.

The streetcar line started on Dominion Day 1905. The CPR began selling lots in October 1909.

Greer died in 1925. Greer Avenue is still in Kits Point, a couple of blocks back from the water.

The beach lost his name. The street kept it.

Sources: City of Vancouver Archives, Major Matthews, "Early Vancouver," volume 2, "The Name Kitsilano," and volume 7, "Samuel Greer of Greer's Beach and Sheriff Armstrong"; Laura Ishiguro, UBC, talk to the Vancouver Historical Society, 28 March 2019; Kitsilano.ca; Miss604.
Photo: "Bathing beauties at Greer's Beach (Kitsilano Beach)," about 1898, AM54-S4-: Be P67. City of Vancouver Archives, Major Matthews collection. Public domain.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

FROM ARCHIVE: she built a condo before Canada had a condo law.The 1910 photograph shows Point Grey Road: one large house...
09/03/2026

FROM ARCHIVE: she built a condo before Canada had a condo law.

The 1910 photograph shows Point Grey Road: one large house on a huge overgrown lot, a dirt road, poles, forest. Half a century later Lois Milsom found almost the same thing on that street.

In 1956 Lois Milsom enrolled in architecture at UBC. She was older than her classmates and raising three children. For her thesis she chose not a drawing but a real building. She decided to build the townhouses herself.

In 1963 she bought a stretch of Point Grey Road that ran 198 feet along the water and was already cut into six lots. She paid $80,000. She kept one lot, sold five to her future neighbours, and built one project across all of them.

That is a condominium: separate owners, one building. Except that no law for that kind of ownership existed in Canada yet.

The path was not an easy one:
- The project was done by Erickson/Massey, Arthur Erickson's firm.
- By the Vancouver Sun's count, she went to city council five times before she got approval in 1965.
- In her telling, the bank told her that no woman in Canada had taken a loan that size before her without a co-signer.

The building was finished in 1965. British Columbia's strata law came a year later, in 1966. So Lois built a condo before the form of ownership itself existed on paper.

She never got the degree: the UBC architecture school would not accept the finished townhouses.

The houses are still standing on Point Grey Road.

Source: Lois Milsom's own account in an interview with Christopher Cheung, "In Search of Canada's First Condos, and the Woman Who Paved the Way," The Tyee, 26 November 2018. The dates and figures here are her own recollections, half a century later.
Photo: "[Houses on] Point Grey Road, near Waterloo Street," 1910, photographer James Luke Quiney. City of Vancouver Archives, AM1584-: CVA 7-94. Public domain.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

2.25%. The Bank of Canada held its policy rate. The Bank Rate is 2.5% and the deposit rate is 2.20%.The rate has sat at ...
09/02/2026

2.25%. The Bank of Canada held its policy rate. The Bank Rate is 2.5% and the deposit rate is 2.20%.

The rate has sat at 2.25% since October 2025. This is the seventh decision in a row with no change.

What the Bank said about the economy:
• GDP rose 3.3% in the second quarter, after very weak growth in the first
• Unemployment edged down to 6.4% in July, though demand for labour stays subdued
• Inflation has been hovering around 3%, mainly on gasoline prices
• Excluding gasoline, July inflation was 2.2%, with core measures close to 2%

On housing the decision carries one line: following several weak quarters, there was some rebound in housing activity.

The Bank names its risks plainly. The Middle East conflict is keeping energy prices high. New US tariffs and Canadian counter-measures have been announced after Canada and the United States broke off trade talks. Both situations, in the Bank's words, remain fluid. Governing Council says it is prepared to adjust monetary policy as needed.

The next scheduled rate announcement is October 28.

Source: Bank of Canada, "Bank of Canada maintains the policy rate at 2¼%", September 2, 2026.

Thinking of making a move? Let's talk strategy.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · 604 961 6413
Valeriya Dudchenko REALTOR® · 778 892 4462
[email protected]
Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

RBC expects the market to turn, and not this year.The bank published its updated housing outlook on September 1. The per...
09/02/2026

RBC expects the market to turn, and not this year.

The bank published its updated housing outlook on September 1. The percentages below are the change from the year before.

British Columbia:
• Resales: -4.6% in 2026, 7.8% in 2027
• Home price index: 0.5% in 2027, the first gain in two years

Canada:
• Resales: 453,200 in 2026 (-3.6%), 483,600 in 2027 (6.7%)
• Home price index: $794,200 in 2026 (-2.3%), $800,700 in 2027 (0.8%)

Condos are the exception. For British Columbia as a whole RBC expects growth in 2027. Condo prices in the Vancouver area, on the same forecast, keep falling, possibly into 2027, on heavy inventory and quiet investor demand.

On rates RBC is blunt: they have hit bottom. The bank sees the Bank of Canada holding until the end of this year and raising in 2027. Long term rates are already drifting up.

For a Metro Vancouver buyer that reads two ways. Waiting for cheaper money does not look like it pays. Waiting for a cheaper condo, on the same forecast, still might.

One caveat. This is one bank's forecast, not a result. RBC counts four false starts in this market since 2023.

Source: RBC Economics, "Mid-year outlook for Canada's housing market: Between correction and recovery", September 1, 2026.

Thinking of making a move? Let's talk strategy.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · 604 961 6413
Valeriya Dudchenko REALTOR® · 778 892 4462
[email protected]
Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

Market Meter, August 2026. Monthly results. Sales-to-Active.Detached: all eight municipalities are below 12%. North Vanc...
09/01/2026

Market Meter, August 2026. Monthly results. Sales-to-Active.
Detached: all eight municipalities are below 12%. North Vancouver is the highest at 11.6%, West Vancouver the lowest, with 20 of its 462 active listings sold over the month, or 4.3%. Vancouver, the largest market, sits at 8.5%.
Townhouses and duplex: the one segment in seller's territory is Port Coquitlam, where 18 of 67 active listings sold, or 26.9%. Coquitlam (19.2%) and North Vancouver (18.7%) follow, and Burnaby is the slowest at 9.5%.
Apartments: Port Coquitlam clears 20% here too, with 25 of 117 active listings sold, or 21.4%. Port Moody follows at 17.4%. The rest of the region sits between 9.1% and 12.3%.
The townhouse segment is small in West Vancouver and Port Moody, five sales each for the month, so we draw no conclusions from it.
Historically, prices tend to face downward pressure when the ratio stays below 12% for a long stretch, and upward pressure when it climbs above 20%.
Thinking of making a move? Let's talk strategy.
Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · 604 961 6413
Valeriya Dudchenko REALTOR® · 778 892 4462
[email protected]
Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

FROM ARCHIVE: The story of British Columbia Sugar Refining CompanyThe sugar refinery on the waterfront is still running....
08/31/2026

FROM ARCHIVE: The story of British Columbia Sugar Refining Company

The sugar refinery on the waterfront is still running. Vancouver paid for the land under it out of the city's own pocket, in 1890.

Benjamin Tingley Rogers started it. In 1889 he was in Montreal installing a new sugar filtering process, heard a great deal about Vancouver while he was there, and decided the Canadian west needed sugar of its own. He was 24, and he did not have a refinery yet.

What he did have was the name. His father had run a sugar refinery in Philadelphia and built another in New Orleans. In New York someone introduced him to William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Van Horne liked the idea, and CPR directors bought shares in the company Rogers had not yet founded.

Then Rogers went to the city. Per the Vancouver Heritage Foundation he asked for $40,000 and got $30,000. On top of that came a tax exemption on land and improvements for 15 years, free water for 10 years, and a municipal loan. On 15 March 1890 it went to a vote of the city's electors. 174 voted in favour. Eight voted against.

The proposal came from the chair of council's finance committee, John M. Browning. He was also the land commissioner for the CPR. He was also the representative of the directors who were financing the refinery. Council, under a development-minded mayor, David Oppenheimer, did not see a conflict of interest in that. A month later Browning became the company's first president.

The first melt of raw sugar went through on 16 January 1891.

In the 1895 photograph the refinery is smoking away in the middle of a field of stumps. There is no city around it yet, only a clearcut. The second photograph is earlier, from about 1892. A chimney, the works, a white picket fence, and one man standing in the archway.

The arithmetic came quickly. By 1916 the company's assets had grown from an initial investment of $250,000 to $7.5 million, and daily output from 30,000 to 900,000 pounds of refined sugar.

It paid for the finest house in the city. Rogers built it on Davie Street out of sandstone quarried on Gabriola Island, which is where the house got its name. It had 18 fireplaces, and the owner's initials, BTR, on the doorknobs.

He would not buy land, though. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives that as the second reason for his fortune, right after his skill at running the business: he refused to speculate in land and resources, and in urban real estate above all. He sat out the boom of 1909 to 1913, when the rest of Vancouver was trading lots. Of the 25 men who ran the city's largest companies and died before the mid 1920s, he is the only one who left more than a million dollars.

Rogers died on 17 June 1918. Per the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, in 1924 the house on Davie Street was divided into apartments.

The refinery is still working. The address on the company's website today is 123 Rogers Street, Vancouver.

Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Rogers, Benjamin Tingley"; Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Vancouver Heritage Site Finder; Lantic Rogers; Changing Vancouver; Eve Lazarus; City of Vancouver Archives.
Photos: 1) "Photograph of BC Sugar refinery," 1895, AM1592-1-S2-: 2011-092.3821. 2) "BC Sugar Refinery Co. Ltd.," about 1892, 1970s copy print, AM1592-1-S5-F016-: 2011-092.2107. Both City of Vancouver Archives, British Columbia Sugar Refining Company fonds. Public domain.

Dmitri Dudchenko PREC · Rain City Realty Group · Royal LePage Sussex

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West Vancouver, BC
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