George Wong will be moving into the third floor of One Harbour Green
Malcolm Parry
Sun
Realtor of The Year George Wong sold out the waterfront One Harbour Green to, among others, himself.
GEORGE WONG, 49, has a special reason to look from his 18th-floor office window in West Hastings Street‘s Guinness Tower and watch the One Harbour Green project rising two blocks away. And it’s not just because the Macdonald Realty Realtor of the Year and his 25-member Platinum Project Marketing Group sold out the 57-unit development in a little over a month.
In October, the Hong Kong-born, Vancouver-raised Wong will actually move into the building, where his third-floor, 2,200-square-foot unit (plus 3,000-square-foot deck) set him back “a lot less” than the penthouse. That’s the one for which Wong got a record $6.02 million from a Texan couple, for whom it will be a “recreational” — and fourth — home away from home.
Wong won’t have to move his furniture and clothes quite so far. He lives 13 floors higher in the nearby Anila, which is the first in ASPAC Developments’ alphabet of Coal Harbour projects — Anila, Bahania, Casina, Denia, Escala — which only changed sequence with One Harbour Green.
The new naming rule will hold for at least one more development, the 71-unit, $180-million Two Harbour Green. Its 5,800-square-foot penthouse and 3,000-square-foot “sky garden” will fetch “over $8 million — closer to 10” when sales begin in April, Wong said.
That project will easily take Wong past a career sales total of $1 billion — still small spuds beside ASPAC brother-principals Raymond, Thomas and Walter Kwok’s reported joint net worth of $13.7 billion.
As for the size and cost of the gestating Three Harbour Green, “That depends on what we get from buyers at Number Two,” Wong said. But he does expect them to maintain their current composition of 60 per-cent local, 20 per-cent American and the remainder from Britain, Germany and elsewhere.
“Very few Asian are buying here now,” he said. “And those that do are already local residents.”
Some may also be brushing up on their meditation, which Wong began as a University of B.C. commerce and accounting student and now practises twice daily.
He gets more than psychic and academic rewards from the Point Grey campus nowadays. He sold out Orca West’s 95-unit Galleria project there in one week last month, but expects to take three months moving Brenmor’s upscale, low-rise Esse, where Latin scholars may clamour for unit 2B.
Looking into his five-year crystal ball, Wong sees “a lot more world travellers coming here to buy for recreational purposes in Victoria, Kelowna and Vernon.” Meanwhile, Vancouver working couples “are setting aside their capital for weekend getaways in place like Agassiz,” where, coincidentally, he represents a property near the Sandpiper golf course.
As for Wong in 2010, “I want to spend two months a year in Bali, two in the Caribbean, six in Vancouver, and the rest I’ll fill in — maybe Tibet.
“I told you I’ve started meditation again.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
