The Chilliwack discount, revisited

Once upon a time, in a simpler, cheaper era we called “2011,” your average house in Chilliwack would cost you about $340,000.

If you were looking for a home at that time, that price might not have struck you as cheap. But it would have looked appealing compared to homes to the west, where a house in Langley would set you back an incredible $524,000. The difference between the two homes was $184,000 and a Chilliwack home was about 35% cheaper.

It was, as they say, a different time.

Ten years later in 2021, The Current looked at the price differential and found that the typical Chilliwack house was, on average, more than a half-million dollars cheaper than a comparable building in Langley. As home prices had ballooned, the Chilliwack Discount, as we called it, had also more than doubled.

Revisiting the data two years later, the gap has grown even larger, leaving anyone moving west facing a more difficult situation and further incentivizing eastward migration within the Lower Mainland.

Cheaper in the east

This story uses data from August 2021 and 2023 provided by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board and the Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board.

The cause of the Chilliwack discount was and is no mystery. The closer one gets towards Vancouver—and its sky-high land prices—the higher home prices are. The further one gets from the big city, the cheaper land and homes get.

The proximity to downtown Vancouver influences prices all over the Lower Mainland—and, indeed, British Columbia. It can be seen in commuting patterns, with masses of people heading west in the morning, and driving east in the evening. It also has multiple knock-on effects. People who work in Vancouver seek out cheaper housing in Surrey driving up prices there, which leads people who work in Surrey to seek housing in Langley, and people in Langley seeking out housing in Abbotsford. And so on, all the way to Hope.

Continues below

The pattern is not new. Vancouver homes have long been more expensive than those in the suburbs. But as home values have increased, they have stretched the price gaps between each municipality.

What had been relatively modest gaps became chasms by 2021. Between 2011 and 2021, home prices rose at approximately the same rate—about 160%—across the entirety of the Fraser Valley valley. But the more valuable the home, the larger pure dollar benefit is to be made from a 160% increase in prices. (Here’s a comparison just to demonstrate how the math works. Take two homes: one valued at $200,000, the other valued at $400,000. If both their values were to double—to $400,000 and $800,000, respectively, the difference between the two home values also doubles, from $200,000 to $400,000.)

By 2021, a house in Langley was about $250,000 more expensive than a house in Abbotsford, and a house in Abbotsford was about $335,000 more expensive than a house in Chilliwack. Notably, that Abbotsford-to-Chilliwack gap was wider than the Langley-to-Abbotsford price gap.

Turn the clock forward two years and something weird has happened.

The price gap between houses in Langley and Abbotsford has widened even further, even as the differential between homes in Chilliwack and Abbotsford has slightly declined. Today, a Langley home is about $424,000 more than one in Abbotsford, while a house in Abbotsford is about $320,000 more expensive than one in Chilliwack.

In just two years, the Langley-to-Abbotsford gap ballooned, and is now considerably wider than the Chilliwack-and-Abbotsford price differential.

Much of the growth in price differential took place between the summers of 2021 and 2022, as home prices in Langley rose by $200,000 but those in Abbotsford remained roughly level. The gap has widened even further over the last year. The last 12 months have seen fluctuating prices across the valley, but house prices in Langley today are more expensive than a year ago, while in Abbotsford they are slightly lower. Prices in Chilliwack are nearly identical to a year ago.

The context

Why have house prices in Langley risen faster recently than those in Abbotsford? There are (at least) two potential forces at play.

The first concerns the fact that the Fraser Valley’s home prices are heavily influenced by those in Vancouver and its surroundings. Because of that, home prices in Abbotsford and Chilliwack tend to take some time to catch up to price trends in the west. So when prices in Vancouver and Langley go up, prices in Abbotsford and Chilliwack often take time to match those increases. Likewise, when prices begin dropping further west, those valuation drops aren’t immediately registered in the eastern valley. (Part of this is likely related to how real estate boards report “benchmark” home prices that use complicated formulas to try to understand the price of a “typical” house.

The prices c643d also be influenced by the way that redevelopment trends influence land and house prices. Home prices all around the valley reflect the demand for land from developers. Across the valley, developers have bought up many homes in order to tear them down and build denser projects like townhomes and apartment buildings. That demand for land—and the ability to build something more profitable on it—creates competition for build-ready lots that drives up prices, while demolitions drive down the supply of single-family houses, even as the resulting development broadly increases the supply of homes in general.

Of the Fraser Valley’s largest municipalities, Abbotsford has seen itself falling behind in approving new developments for building. Those issues have been partly blamed on longer wait times for building permits and development approvals.

As building has slowed in Abbotsford, the price of single-family houses has sagged, compared to what has been seen in neighbouring communities.

Townhomes and apartments

In 2021, we noted how there was a much smaller price gap differential between Chilliwack and Abbotsford when it came townhouses and apartments—and that the gap was shrinking, even as house price gap had widened significantly. At the same time, there remained a significant gap between the cost of townhomes/apartments in Langley and Abbotsford.

The last two years have seen townhome prices significantly increase, then decline, across the valley. And the fluctuations have nearly doubled the townhome/apartment price gap between Abbotsford and Langley.

The Chilliwack and Abbotsford price gaps, meanwhile, have bounced around but, in general, widened over the course of two years for both townhomes and apartments.

As of the start of September, a townhouse in Langley cost about $200,000 more than a similar home in Abbotsford, while that Abbotsford townhouse would be around $45,000 more expensive than if it were to be located in Chilliwack. (The gap was higher than in 2021, but less than in 2022.)

The benchmark Langley apartment, meanwhile, cost around $160,000 more than its Abbotsford version. That figure is more than double the gap in 2021. Abbotsford apartments fetched around $30,000 more than similar units in Chilliwack, just slightly higher than two years ago.