Why Older Victoria Condos Cost $327 Less Per Square Foot

Victoria condo market

The cheaper neighbourhood also sells sixteen days faster. Here is what six decades of condo building actually does to the price in Victoria — and what to check before you buy into any of it.

There are two apartments for sale in Cook Street Village right now, about a block apart, for roughly the same money. One of them is twice the size of the other.

Two active MLS listings in Fairfield West, asking prices, August 2026.

That is not a quirk of two listings. It is the single most reliable pattern in the Victoria condo market, and it holds across more than a thousand sales.

The gap is not really about age. It is about what the building is made of.

It is tempting to read the price difference as new-versus-old — better finishes, newer appliances, a nicer lobby. That is not what you are paying for. You are paying for structure.

Almost every Victoria condo built since about 2000 is steel and concrete. Almost every one built before about 1995 is wood frame. Concrete costs more to build, and it costs more to operate — more elevators, more parkade, more mechanical systems, more building envelope to maintain. Of the roughly 400 Victoria condos listed for sale as we wrote this, concrete buildings ran about 28% more per square foot per month in strata fees than wood-frame ones.

There is a shortcut that works almost every time: count the storeys. Six or more and it is almost certainly concrete. One to three and it is almost certainly wood.

One caveat on that rule, and it is a recent one. Six storeys was the legal ceiling for wood-frame construction in BC until December 2019, when it went to twelve. So a six-storey building put up before 2018 is concrete; a six-storey building put up since could be either. If it is exactly six storeys and recent, check rather than assume.

What each decade actually gives you

Here is every City of Victoria condo sale over the past twelve months, sorted by when the building went up.

City of Victoria condo apartments, sold, trailing twelve months to 1 August 2026.

Read the “per sq ft” column and then the “median price” column, because they tell opposite stories. A 1970s condo costs $560 a foot and a 2020s condo costs $887 — a 58% premium for the newer building. But the median 1970s sale was $502,000 and the median 2020s sale was $582,000, which is a much smaller gap. The reason is size. Buyers of older condos are not spending less. They are getting more.

The 1970s and 80s: this is where the space is

Among condos listed for sale, the 1980s produced the biggest units in the city, with the 1970s just behind — both comfortably over a thousand square feet at the median. No decade since has come close. These are also the cheapest buildings to run, and 1970s stock sold in 24 days over the past year, the fastest of any decade.

What you give up is mechanical. Baseboard electric heat is close to universal in this era, which means no cooling and often nowhere sensible to add it. Flat tar-and-gravel roofs are common, and they are a large, lumpy expense when they come due. Neither is a reason to walk away. Both are reasons to read the depreciation report closely.

The 1990s: the decade to read most carefully

Wood frame behind stucco, built in British Columbia in the 1990s, is the construction profile behind the leaky-condo era. Among Victoria condos listed for sale, the 1990s have the lowest share of concrete construction and the highest share of stucco cladding of any decade.

This does not mean a 1990s building has a problem. A great many were remediated twenty years ago and are now completely sound — and a remediated building with a well-funded reserve can be a better buy than an unremediated one from any era. What it means is that this is the decade where the question “when was the envelope work done, and what did it cover?” matters most. Ask it before you make an offer, not after.

The 2000s: the reset, still visible in today’s listings

Then the building code changed, and you can still see the moment in what is for sale today. Between the 1990s and the 2000s, the share of Victoria condo listings with stucco cladding collapsed, and the share built in concrete roughly tripled. That is the post-leaky-condo regulatory response, sitting in the MLS thirty years later.

The 2010s: the hardest decade to defend

The 2010s are the squeeze. Among current listings they have the smallest median unit of any decade — under 600 square feet — and the highest strata fee per square foot. In the sold data they run $806 a foot, second only to the 2020s, and take 39 days to sell with only 4% going over asking. Most expensive to run, least space, and the slowest to move. If one era is hard to argue for on the numbers, it is this one.

The 2020s: you are buying cooling

Units got bigger again in the 2020s, and fees per square foot came back down. But the genuine functional difference — the one thing on this whole list a buyer can feel on a hot August afternoon — is that roughly a third of 2020s listings have a heat pump. No other decade comes close. If air conditioning matters to you, that narrows your search faster than any other filter.

Where you buy matters as much as when it was built

Layer neighbourhood on top of vintage and the picture sharpens considerably. These four are all within a four-kilometre walk of each other.

Condo apartments, sold, trailing twelve months to 1 August 2026, with active listing counts as of early August.

Downtown is the buyer’s neighbourhood. It has the lowest median price of the four and by far the most choice — 164 listings, roughly six times James Bay’s inventory. Sales take 39 days and fewer than 3% go over asking, so there is room to think. What you are buying is small: the highest price per foot of any of these except Songhees, on the least space.

Fairfield West is the value. At $542 a foot it is the cheapest of the four by a wide margin — nearly $200 a foot below Downtown. It is also, unusually, the fastest, at 23 days, with 9.3% of sales going over asking. Cheap and quick do not normally travel together, and the reason they do here is supply: eleven active listings in the entire neighbourhood. There is nothing to choose from, so what comes up goes quickly.

James Bay breaks the pattern. It has the highest median price of the three non-Songhees neighbourhoods at $732,500, but a lower price per square foot than Downtown. People pay more there and get more for it. It also has the highest share of sales over asking of the four, at 10.2%. That combination — paying up, getting space, and still competing — is what a neighbourhood people actively want to live in looks like in the data.

Three questions worth more than any number above

1. Ask for the price per square foot, not the price

It is the only figure that compares a 1975 two-bedroom with a 2022 one-bedroom honestly. Half a million dollars buys either one. It does not buy the same thing, and the listing will not do that arithmetic for you.

2. Ask for the depreciation report — and check the date on it

This changed on 1 July 2026. Every strata corporation with five or more strata lots in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Capital Regional District (Gulf Islands and boat- or plane-access islands excepted) must now have a current depreciation report. The old option to waive or defer it by a three-quarters vote is gone, and reports must be renewed at least every five years. The rest of BC has until 1 July 2027.

This is the single biggest improvement in condo buying in years. The thing buyers used to guess at — what the building already knows it needs, and when — is now a document you can read before you write an offer.

3. Ask what the strata fee costs per square foot

A monthly fee on its own tells you very little. A $420 fee on a 590-square-foot apartment is not cheaper than a $560 fee on a 1,020-square-foot one; it is substantially more expensive per foot of what you own. And no monthly fee, however low, tells you about a special assessment that has not been called yet. That is what the depreciation report is for.

And one thing to check before all of them

If you find an apartment priced at roughly half what everything around it costs, that is very rarely a bargain and very often a different product — leasehold, co-operative, life lease, or age-restricted. All of these are legitimate ways to house yourself. None of them is the same as owning a freehold strata lot, and each has different financing and resale consequences. Ask which one it is first, not after you have fallen for the view.

Common questions

Are older condos cheaper in Victoria?

Per square foot, yes, substantially. City of Victoria condos built in the 1970s sold at $560 per square foot over the past twelve months, against $887 for those built in the 2020s. By total price the gap is much narrower — $502,000 against $582,000 — because older units are considerably larger.

Why do newer condos cost more per square foot?

Mostly construction type. Newer buildings are overwhelmingly steel and concrete, which costs more to build and more to operate than the wood-frame construction typical of Victoria condos before the mid-1990s. Newer units are also smaller on average, which raises the per-foot figure further.

Is a 1990s condo in Victoria a bad buy?

Not inherently. 1990s buildings are more likely to be wood frame behind stucco, the profile associated with the leaky-condo era, but many were remediated long ago and are sound today. The question to ask is when envelope work was done and what it covered — not what year the building went up.

Which Victoria neighbourhood has the cheapest condos per square foot?

Of the neighbourhoods in this analysis, Fairfield West, at $542 per square foot over the trailing twelve months across 75 sales. It is also the fastest-selling, at a median of 23 days, with only eleven active listings at the time of writing.

How do I tell whether a building is concrete or wood frame?

Count the storeys. Six or more is almost always steel and concrete; one to three is almost always wood frame. The exception is recent construction — BC raised the wood-frame height limit from six storeys to twelve in December 2019 — so verify rather than assume on a six-storey building completed since 2018.

Does every BC strata need a depreciation report now?

Every strata corporation with five or more strata lots does. In Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Capital Regional District the deadline was 1 July 2026; elsewhere in BC it is 1 July 2027. Reports must be updated at least every five years, and can no longer be waived or deferred by owner vote.