A Coquitlam woman is behind a new website that is collecting data on "lonely" homes.
Christine Boehringer said she hopes the site will help shed light on how many homes in Metro Vancouver are unoccupied and generate a discussion on whether Vancouver's empty homes tax should also apply to other cities in the region.
"It's a very tight housing market. The cost to buy is so astronomical, I think we're raising awareness of the issue," she said, adding empty homes can attract vandalism and theft.
The site, lonelyhomes.ca, went up around Christmas and Boehringer said the response so far has been "fairly strong," with users registering 206 empty homes, with the majority — 186 — single-family homes.
Users set up an account on the site and submit an address they believe to be an empty home. The data is grouped by postal code — specific addresses do not appear on the site — and shown on a Metro Vancouver map.
Boehringer said the database storing submitted addresses is secured and data is encrypted between browsers and the site.
She said she was inspired to create the website about a year ago, when discussion about the possible effects of foreign investment in the local real estate market were at a peak.
"I knew there were a couple of empty homes near me," Boehringer said. "They're not for rent, they're not for sale, there's nobody there, and I wondered how many of them there are. Walking further afield, there were actually quite a few."
With an additional 15% property transfer tax for foreign nationals purchasing property in Metro Vancouver and Vancouver's empty homes tax, which adds an additional 1% tax on a vacant property's assessed value in that city, Boehringer is curious to see whether a trend develops over time with more or fewer lonely homes.
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@spayneTC
