Shaughnessy home has been bought and sold six times in 13 years
And if you just missed out the first half-dozen times, it?s for sale again
Joanne Lee-Young
The Vancouver Sun
There is a single-family home at 5387 Cypress Street, not far from where Shaughnessy hits 41st Avenue, that has been bought and sold six times in the last 13 years. And it’s for sale again.
The Vancouver home was featured this month on the cover of the local edition of Homes and Land magazine, and described as a “Charming Traditional 5 bedroom, 5 bath 3,519 sqft Shaughnessy home on a 78 x 122 ft lot.”
That may be the case, but no other home in Shaughnessy has been bought and sold as many times, according to sales data going back to 2003.
There is one home at 1068 w 29th Ave. that has been sold five times, but it last changed hands in late 2014 and isn’t for sale. About a dozen other homes in the area have sold four times in the time period.
There have been times when the Cypress Street house has been quite sought after and snapped up in as few as 10, 12 and 15 days on the market. Three of its owners held it for around four to five years each. The other three, and now, the current owner, owned it for between one and two years.
Indeed, homeowners have taken advantage of rapidly rising prices in the last few years and hopped in an out of properties when “wow, they had a year where (their property) went up by $1 million,” said RE/MAX Select Properties agent Patrick Weeks, who has the listing for the Cypress Street house. “Over the five or six years, a lot of houses have changed hands a number of times with rising property values.”
The homeowner is asking $5.28 million, down from an original price of $5.5 million when it was listed on September 8. The owner, who bought the house last September 2015 for $4.55 million, declined to comment.
For some owners in the past, the house, which was built in 1926, has been an investment and used as a rental property.
The other factor likely in play for some of the more recent sales is the house’s RS-3A zoning, which is clearly stated in its current MLS listing.
In June 2014, the City of Vancouver adopted “temporary procedures to protect pre-1940 character homes” on the west side.
It was a first attempt to stem the demolition of older houses that are located outside of First Shaughnessy, which gained its own guidelines when it was designated the city’s first ever conservation area.
The measures, which include reviewing the character merit of homes built before 1940 and requiring higher levels of reusing or recycling of materials from demolished homes, applied mostly to homes on the west side that are zoned RS-5, 3 and 3A.
RS-3A is the most seriously prohibitive for an owner that wants to tear down the house and build a new one, said Roy Yang, an agent with Royal Pacific Realty Corp. In 2013, he listed the property at $3.88 million, asking below its assessed value at the time of $4.026 million. The home sold in May 2013 for $3.83 million, according to land documents.
“If you want to build a new house, (the footprint) can only be 12 or so per cent of the lot size,” said Yang. “You can only have about 2,500-square feet above ground. Some people who have bought the house didn’t understand that this is what it means.”
In total, for building a new house on the property, “you could do a 4,000-square foot home, with 1,500-square feet in the basement,” said Weeks. “But that’s not a big home on a lot that is almost 10,000-square feet.”
“City (requirements are) blanketed and not specific to each property,” said Weeks.
The city does allows for some extra square footage if a homeowner is willing to reform an existing home and its character features. However, said Weeks, many buyers looking at this kind of price tag “want to build from scratch rather than do renovations” in a home that has an “older-style floor plan that is not as in fashion now.”
Most of the homes on the street have a “similar complexion” in terms of size and age, said Weeks.
But, across the street and two houses down, there is a property at 5468 Cypress that was sold in February 2011 for $2.998m. The existing home was torn down and replaced with a completely new one that sold a little over a year later in April 2012 for $8.074 million. In June 2016, the now 6,500 plus square-foot home with “old world Tudor inspired elegance” sold for $12.26 million. “It was built under the old policy,” said Yang, the agent.
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