5 March 2008
Houses for $5000, an interesting piece of Nanaimo’s Real Estate past.
Posted by Ryan Coffey under: Just For Fun; Nanaimo Profile and Events; Nanaimo Real Estate Market .
I was visiting some clients of mine a couple of days ago who had bought their home through me about this time last year. The home in question is an older home, which though not in bad shape was due for some renos to clean it up a bit, which is what John and Marget did over recent months among other things.
While I was there, I noticed something on the wall, a page from a newspaper that had been framed. It just looked like an ordinary page from a newspaper at first glance, clearly I was missing something about it, so I asked something like “What’s this?” The answer: “Oh, we found that inside the walls when we did the renos. It’s dated 1961, see?”
At which point I realized that the prices in the ads were really cheap and that the drawing of a lady in the ad was pretty old fashioned, even kitsch.
“Wait… you should see this… we found another page that has all sorts of real estate ads on it. It’s in the computer, because we scanned it.”
And then they showed me the scanned document you can view below. Some of the ads show the address of the property, and the houses are still there. If you or someone you know owns it, you might be interested to know what it sold for back in the day. Most of the houses are between five and ten thousand dollars! My favourite is the 8 acres of land in Cedar for $4,400.
The thing I’ve been wondering, but don’t have the answer to (beyond a wild guess) is how the value of these homes at the time compared to the average cost of living and average income in Nanaimo at the time. I notice the ads for used cars that are a couple of years old are about 1/2 or 1/3 of the price of the cheaper houses. Maybe houses were much more affordable at the time or cars were much less affordable or both.
FYI, the page was scanned multiple times as it was obviously too big for the scanner so it appears on multiple pages in a sort of jumble. If I had any clue about photoshop, I’d make it all fit together neatly, but I don’t.
Thank you John and Marget for letting me put this up!
Click below:
Nanaimo Real Estate Listing from 1961