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18 B C B U S I N E S S . C A S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 5 and unusual-for-Vancouver sidewalk arcade—had a place on the fifth floor recently listed for $550,000. The secret there? You have to buy outright because the building's apartments are an "undivided interest." Unlike with a condo, you don't own a legally defined air parcel. To get a mortgage, you'd have to get every other person in the building to co- sign and, since that isn't going to happen, you'll need to find that $550,000 on your own. A couple of other anomalies are in the list—a unit at the Rosedale on Robson, where you have the right to stay 12 nights a year; a small apartment in a high-rise in the Joyce– Collingwood neighbourhood near Boundary and Kingsway. But the dominant group of They look so tantalizing when they pop up on your sad and desperate search: more than three dozen apartments in Vancouver for sale at an asking price of less than $400,000. One is even listed at $282,000. Sure, the maintenance payments seem high—$1,000 a month for some of them—but how bad could that be when you'd have a mortgage that's smaller than the cost of some people's kitchen renos? Welcome to the back alleys and quirky side streets of Vancouver real estate, my friend. Where you soon discover there is truly no free lunch. Especially for the majority of the apartments listed, which are in a special, strange category all their own. A few of the under- $400,000 collection that I perused on one particular day this past spring were easy to understand. There are the apartments at 138 East Hastings Street, the Sequel building. Four of them, in fact, priced at between $349,000 and $385,000. New- ish, looking reasonable, taxes at $1,000 or so for the year and maintenance fees in the $270-a-month range. That's the unlikely condo project—an experimental venture by a private developer with BC Housing support to introduce affordable owner- ship housing to the area—that replaced the once-legendary Pantages vaudeville theatre. It's also plumb in the middle of a block that's now home to Vancouver's first supervised-injection site and the empty lot where the hellish Balmoral Hotel used to sit, both of which lie on the oppo- site side of the street. It's on the same side as the Carnegie Community Centre, a couple of boarded-up storefronts, a dubious-looking convenience store and the Brandiz Hotel. A block where the sound of sirens is, unfortunately, all too familiar. Aha, the price makes sense now. Then there's the Lee Building, beloved by hipsters of all generations. The historic brick building at Main and Broadway—with its early-20th-century design HOW TO SNAG A $300,000 CONDO IN VANCOUVER It is truly the equivalent of landing a white whale: finding affordable housing in Vancouver, where soaring real estate prices have broken many a potential buyer's heart. But if you look deep enough in the market, there are deals to be had... but they are not for the faint of heart. L A N D V A L U E S by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a longtime Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation.

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