Many Canadians would cut back on discretionary spending, buy with friends or buy a lakefront lot and build later – anything to get their own vacation cottage, according to a survey this spring by Royal LePage Real Estate Services. More than half of those who plan to buy a cottage said they would even rent it out part time to help pay for it.
And paying for it can be a challenge. According to the survey, the typical price in Western Canada for a 1,000 square foot, 3-bedroom waterfront cottage is in the $300,000 to $400,000 range and can spike as high as $800,000 in B.C.
The survey found that demand for recreational property is starting to heat up after cooling down since 2008.
And this is being seen in the classic Okanagan cottage country, where residential sales were up 18 per cent in April compared to a year earlier in the Shuswap Lake region.
The Royal LePage report cited Okanagan lakefront cottages in the $400,000 range, down from $650,000 to $1 million a year ago, but local Royal LePage agents were quick to distance themselves from the numbers. Even Royal LePage president and CEO Phil Soper candidly discounted the price estimates as being “subjective” rather than accurate.
One Okanagan agent said a realistic price range today for a lake cottage would be $300,000 to $700,000, which he said hasn’t changed in two years. “There hasn’t been the massive price changes [that] appeared in the report,” said Steve Gray, a broker at Royal LePage, Kelowna.
