How I almost bought an $875,000 Vancouver condo as a single, starving artist.

Keyword there: almost. Spoiler alert: it didn’t come together #stillrenting.

[5-minute read]

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The skies outside my apartment have been my closest audience this last year. And to be honest, they’re witnessing a pretty serious ego-death these days.

Does that happen to everyone approaching 40?

Thankfully, the views have kept me dreaming. Keep me scheming. Keep me reaching. Grinding. Hustling. And kept me humble. Held by nature. And inspired despite the pressure of an otherwise soul-peeling, bark-shedding season.

Growth is not always comfortable. I’m feeling the tight restriction that comes just before the expansion.

Something else that might not always be comfortable… My use of long, often too-verbose sentences. Like the one I’m going to try to impress you with next.

I’m sitting in my how-did-I-get-so-lucky-to-live-here second bedroom, which I’ve recently converted into an office while I take a much-needed and long-overdue break from living with roommates in order to stretch out, decompress, and enjoy the view (along with some solitude) while I gather my thoughts and prepare for a meeting with the Attorney General’s office.

Three years ago, this unit was appraised at just $125,000 shy of $1 million. Even though it was well beyond my scrappy little single artist's budget, I was plotting an ambitious scheme to buy it.

Broke as I am, I’ve always been rich in smarts and creativity. So I jumped ship from Bank of Montreal to Vancity Credit Union and worked with Small Business BC to develop a bed-and-breakfast business plan.

The vision would have been to sue the pants off of the man who inflicted acts of torture against me in a foreign country (if he’d had any assets or net worth to sue for) and if that didn’t work out (bad news, it didn’t), I’d work hard to secure a women-in-business growth loan, as well as a first—and second—mortgage with private-lenders in order to buy the property and convert it into an Airbnb.

Luckily, a unit like this, in a building with dozens of successful Airbnbs, was initially strong enough collateral for private lenders. Suddenly, the far-fetched dream was beginning to take shape. It was a creative financial risk, but lenders seemed willing to take it.

The exercise gave me an appreciation for my own resourcefulness that, up until that point, I hadn’t given myself enough credit for. The mortgage was going to be steep, but the Airbnb revenue lucrative, so I kept going.

While working on the business plan with Small Business BC, we decided it would be worth my while to register and claim what would otherwise be personal income as business income instead.

That would mean higher corporate taxes on what could otherwise be a personally owned asset—but it would finally make me a homeowner.

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Before finding this condo, between 2015 and 2019, I moved nine times in four-and-a-half years. This was during an era when the Vancouver real estate market was really hot. As such, more than what would be considered a reasonable share of landlords were reclaiming their units to either sell or reno-vict tenants from. It happened to me three times in as many years.

The other four moves were short-term rentals out of necessity until a place that felt like home became available. Moving is no joke. It’s in the top five for most stressful events in a person’s life.

These four years also coincided with an already difficult time. I’m just going to dangle that carrot for now. You can learn a fuller version of the story here. [Content note/spoiler alert: brief mention of physical assault and sexual assault, while in a foreign country.]

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Back to the double mortgage / Airbnb story: I honestly didn’t care that I’d be paying more in taxes. At least I’d be building equity, unlike the hundreds of thousands I’d paid in rent over the past two decades. As it started to come together, I grew excited.

This was at the tail end of quantitative easing, though. And things were about to start tightening back up.

A good contingency plan was to Airbnb the unit full-time for the first year to cover the nearly $5,000 combined cost of mortgage and monthlies. Yikes. Luckily, I was booked back-to-back with pet-sitting gigs for most of the next year and a half.

I decided to purchase a 1978 17’ Canadian-manufactured boler travel trailer that I could camp/travel in as my home-away-from-home when I wasn’t otherwise petsitting. I was 37 years old, single, and had been cooped up all through COVID… why not?

The hiccup was the last interest rate hike of 2022. It put private lenders on notice. Financial institutions that had long profited from real estate speculation in Vancouver were suddenly much more cautious. To prevent the housing bubble from bursting, the condo market in Vancouver was about to experience a real cooldown.

Even still, two friends offered to loan me $40k to help me cross the finish line. The typical financiers, my parents, had just gone through a pretty stressful period. My Dad had undergone Kidney Stone surgery during COVID. Typically, a pretty routine surgery. Unfortunately, though, there were complications. A laser caught a blood vessel, and he experienced significant blood loss, resulting in the need for a blood transfusion and a total of 10 days spent in the hospital.

A year later, he was scheduled for triple bypass heart surgery, which became a quadruple bypass while under the knife. There were post-op complications this time as well, and many days in ICU monitoring lung failure, kidney failure, and heart failure before the hospital staff were able to bring him back to stable health.

Not so cute story… Turns out you get pumped up with gas during surgery. If the body struggles to deflate post-op, they can insert a tube to help deflate you faster — so to speak. This time, however, the ‘deflation tube’ had accidentally remained clipped, essentially turning my dad into a bigger balloon, rather than deflating him faster. Whoops.

He’s okay now. But that stretch was brutal, and this was all at the tail end of the COVID-era.

Needless to say, my parents weren’t in the frame of mind to talk business or estate planning. My brother, to his credit, offered to buy into my parents’ property, allowing them to redeploy capital with me. However, the conversation proved to put too much pressure on my parents, who were presently in the midst of confronting their own mortality.

The timing wasn’t great. The unit was not sold. I continued to rent. Now it’s two years later, and FIFA ’26 is just around the corner.

—

I didn’t get the condo.
But I did get the blueprint.
And the next time I try, I won’t be building it on borrowed faith.

I didn’t become a homeowner.
But I did become a woman who knows exactly what she’s capable of under pressure.
Which is… honestly kinda more terrifying.

— TwT || This Woman’s Truth™