Realtor Joan Wolf has listed this five-bedroom, five-bathroom home on Snowbird Way at Big White for $2.8 million.
Image Credit: Submitted/Joan Wolf Real Estate
December 27, 2023 - 7:00 AM
A recent national study has shown prices for homes on ski hills dropped in most markets in 2023. But that’s not the case at Big White Ski Resort where despite declining sales benchmark prices have risen.
“The higher dollar value stuff is moving,” realtor Joan Wolf, who specializes in Big White properties, told iNFOnews.ca. “The $100,000 to $1 million segment is more stagnant. A lot of people are doing the wait and see thing.”
But foreign buyers are coming back into the market and one property on Feathertop Way just sold for $3.4 million.
Even before that sale, the benchmark prices at Big White had climbed by about 10% this year over last to $682,624, Wolf said.
“In general, it has largely been Canadians buying because of the mass exodus from bigger cities,” she said. “A lot of people who sold in Toronto or Vancouver, they buy a place in Kelowna and then buy a place at Big White.”
New provincial rules that will prevent people from buying homes strictly for the Airbnb market are already pushing people to consider Big White instead.
It, and other ski hills throughout the Thompson-Okanagan, are exempt from the new rules that say homes have to be the owners’ principal residences.
“You can’t buy an Airbnb in the Okanagan anymore, in certain areas,” Wolf said. “But because Big White is exempt, it will be interesting to see the effect of that.
“It’s only an hour away so a lot of people in the summer or the shoulder season may go: ‘I can still Airbnb and drive down,’ so it might help with the rental market which, in turn, means price points in sales because investors look at that.”
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The ones who are waiting to decide whether to buy or not are mostly concerned about mortgage rates.
While those rates may affect the ability of some to afford a ski cabin, there are others who see the high interest rates helping to create bargains.
The fact that existing owners facing higher monthly payments when their mortgages came due has already led to some price erosion in some parts of the market, Wolf said.
A Royal LePage report released in late November said prices for single-family homes on ski hills dropped 0.7% across the country in the first 10 months of the year.
A few, like Quebec’s Mont Sutton and Mount Washington on Vancouver Island, saw increases of more than 25% in that market segment while Mont Sainte-Anne in Quebec saw prices go up 83.4%.
Sun Peaks Resort, on the other hand, saw a 21.3% price drop to a benchmark price of $1.2 million, the Royal LePage report said.
Revelstoke Mountain Resort, the only other BC mountain the report lists, saw a 1.1% drop to $816,000.
That may be but Wolf pointed out the report only covered the first 10 months of the year – a year in which snow has been late to come and there has been less of it.
“Usually we would get this rush in October, November,” she said. “We’re just starting to get legs now because of the later start.”
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