1 in 4 Vancouver homes could be torn down in next 13 years: study

An architecture professor at the University of British Columbia says about a quarter of detached home inVancouvercould be torn down in just over a decade.

Joseph Dahmen has created a tool that forecasts how many homes could be demolished in the city by 2030 victims of the recent surge in property values.

Dahmen's tool estimates what he calls relative building value, which is how much a home is worth relative to the value of the land it sits on.

From that data, a teardown predictor toolwas developed:the lower the value of the house compared to the land it sits on, the higher the chance the dwellingwill be torn down and replaced.

"If you have $2 millionof land, you'd have to put a $4 millionhouse on it to get intoa range generally considered to be healthy," Dahmen'sfellow researcher and mathematician Jens vonBergmann told CBC News.

"That is very hard to achieve."

Given the recent, rapid rise ofVancouverreal estate values, half the single-family homes in the city already have relative values below 7.5 per cent, which Dahmen and fellow number crunchers say creates a more than 50/50 chance the house will face the wrecking ball.

They say that by 2030, if relatives values continue to plummet, 25 per cent of all single-family homes could be replaced with houses that maximize size.

"It's not clear how that will help affordability,'' says fellow researcher and mathematician Jens von Bergmann in a release.

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"We should ask ourselves how to replace these teardowns with more units of ground-oriented, family-friendly homes on each lot.''

Dahmen and von Bergmann developed the indexusing municipal data and B.C. Assessment records on detached homes bought and sold inVancouverbetween 2005 and 2015.

A news release from the University of British Columbia says the two compared land value, building value and lot size with variables such as whether the property had been torn down a couple of years before or after the sale.

With files from CBC's Megan Batchelor