Real estate porn 3.0

Tony Wanless | Image: iStock | Published: March 13, 2008

Okay, I swore on a stack of bibles I would lay off BC's favourite vice – real estate. But I'm backsliding and I can't help myself. It's everywhere and a wretch like me just can't avoid it.

I mean, right on the front page of this site, and of BCBusiness magazine, is Bob Rennie, the most successful of the B.C. real estate moguls, flashing the possibility that the real estate fever isn’t over yet. Hard to resist. And then they released the latest house price statistics, and I was lost once more. Seems the average price of a house in Vancouver is now cozying up to $900,000.

These revelations, which included lucky homeowners writhing in ecstasy, made front page news and stoked the fires of lust in everyone who saw or heard them. In corollary, they also stoked much disapproval and finger shaking, and many doomsday warnings. Naked lust always does.

So why is this pornographic? Obviously, 900 grand for a 60-year-old bungalow is obscene by most people’s standards. But what makes me feel really dirty is everybody's reaction to the news. In B.C. real estate – even more than sex – is the repository of people’s fears, envies, obsessions and desires. And everybody has an opinion on it.

Online responses to a Province story on the latest prices are typical: They ranged from blaming immigrants (naked fear), to blaming Baby Boomers (naked envy), to blaming “rich people” and their politician camp followers (naked obsession) to advice to get in now because prices will be twice as high in a few years (naked desire).

I have to admit, that like many others stripped of all civilities and wallowing in primeval responses and base emotions like lust, I’m attracted. I want some of that. Or damn those people who got more than I did. Or why didn't I take a chance and buy there, or there, or over there?

You probably know the secret thoughts – we’ve all had them. There’s always somebody somewhere getting more than we are. But there’s something else nagging at me here. Is it all really so disgusting? Surely everybody who owns a house isn’t prostituting himself at the altar of greed?

Maybe most of them are just trying to get along like everybody else and have the advantage of time,

which is what creates those big numbers. Even the guy with that $900,000 house featured in the newspaper story bought it 18 years ago, which is a long time to wait to satisfy an urge.

Also, if I remember right, the same complaints were around then. (In fact, I probably wrote them.)

Lust for real-estate riches is hardly a new phenomenon in this province. I’ve had people tell me that when they bought their first house in the 1960s they had to use apple crates for furniture because they couldn’t afford anything else after paying some obscene price.

So, what exactly has changed, except the numbers?

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