Now in midst of second wave of consumer demand

Ashley Ford
Province

Don’t look for any bubble burst in the Lower Mainland’s vibrant housing market, a senior Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. official said here yesterday.

That is because a “bubble market” currently simply doesn’t exist, Cameron Muir, senior marketing analyst told the CMHC Annual Housing Outlook Conference.

“In fact,” he said in a later interview, “the numbers clearly show that speculators are not entering the market in any significant numbers. When you look at the figures on the numbers buying and selling a home within a year, we see that even in this market the speculation level is less than the average over the last quarter century.”

Muir conceded more speculators may be entering the market but not in significant numbers. “In 1981 speculation was about 50 per cent of the market. Then there was a mini-bubble market in 1989, when 30 per cent of the market was speculative.

“In the mid-90s, it fell further to 20 per cent and year-to-date it is just 12 per cent. The 25-year average is 14 per cent. At present there is just no evidence of large-scale speculation and speculators are certainly not driving the market.”

A major reason is that prices have been rising steadily for years and, to get any major advantage, speculators would have had to have been in on the market early on.

Higher prices are also likely a further deterrent.

Despite the fact that houses have increased in value, prices have only crept above where they were a decade ago with mortgage rates half of what they were, Muir said.

The argument can be made that housing is more affordable than it was a decade ago.

He said good job growth, a solid economy and growing wages translate into a continuing strong market.

“We are now in the midst of a second wave of consumer demand,” Muir said.

Carol Frketich, CMHC regional economist, said home prices will again head higher next year but at a more modest 6.1-per-cent rate than this year’s 14.1 per cent.

Housing starts in B.C. will peak this year at around 33,600, falling to 31,600 next year.

For the seventh consecutive month, real-estate sales across the Fraser Valley exceeded last year’s sales and broke records last set 13 years ago.

Meanwhile, latest resale numbers show no slacking in the market.

The Fraser Valley Real Estate Board said 1,778 sales processed on the Multiple Listing Service in October compared with 1,202 in 2004, an increase of 48 per cent.

Last month’s sales were three per cent higher than September’s 1,726 sales.

The only two comparable Octobers in Fraser Valley‘s history of recording statistics are in 1992 and 1989, with 1,924 sales and 2,195 sales, respectively.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported sales of detached, attached and apartment properties increased by 13.4 per cent to 3,099 units last month compared to 2,734 sales in October a year ago.

“In the last 25 years, October sales numbers have reached over 3,000 only three times,” says board president Georges Pahud.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

Derrick Penner
Sun

ARCHITECTURE I Developer Ian Gillespie and architect James K. Cheng are claiming another iconic spot of Vancouver‘s skyline with their latest development, the Fairmont Pacific Rim Vancouver hotel, a $350-million, 47-storey, 457-foot-high luxury tower that will grace the foot of Burrard Street.

In September, Gillespie’s Westbank Projects and the Peterson Group bought the lot, adjacent to the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre’s expansion, for $86 million, and on Friday revealed details of what will become a sister tower to their existing showpiece Shaw Tower.

Fairmont Pacific Rim will be a five-star, 415-room Fairmont hotel and 173-unit luxury condominium development in the same vein as the West End‘s Shangri-La tower, which is also a Westbank and Cheng collaboration.

Gillespie believes it will be the city’s largest building by square footage (800,000), on what he described as “the best site in Vancouver” on Coal Harbour, next to the convention centre and prominent in future postcard-views of the downtown skyline.

“What excited me most was the idea that I could finish off what I started with the Shaw Tower,” Gillespie said in an interview.

He wants Fairmont Pacific Rim to stand next to Shaw Tower and, while it will look different, have people recognize that it was built by the same developer and architect. Gillespie added that he is driven, in part, by a desire to raise the esthetic bar of Vancouver architecture.

The new hotel joins a growing list of iconic building projects that Gillespie is involved in, that starts with the Shaw Tower and includes the Shangri-La — which at 60 storeys and 640 feet will be the city’s tallest building, and the redevelopment of the old Woodward’s store building on the downtown east side.

Gillespie said the building’s site is already zoned for his intended design, and the architect’s concept has been approved by the city’s design panel. His next step will be to submit a development permit in January, with an intent to put it to market in May and begin construction by July.

Vancouver uber realtor Bob Rennie, of Rennie Marketing Systems, will handle sales of Fairmont Pacific Rim’s condominiums, which he said will sell for between $500,000 and $3.5 million, and he doesn’t see any difficulty with the market absorbing its 173 luxury units.

Rennie anticipates that about 70 per cent of buyers will be local, with the other 30 split between the United States, Europe and Asia.

Westbank Projects will own the building’s hotel, which will occupy its first 21 floors, and be managed on a long-term contract by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts.

Warren Markwart, Fairmont Hotels vice-president of hotel development, said the Fairmont Pacific Rim, the company’s fourth in Vancouver, is an important addition for the company to make in advance of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“Vancouver has a tremendous future in front of it,” Markwart said.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

 

BURNABY MOUNTAIN I Townhouse window arrangement floods Millennium apartments with light

Michael Sasges
Sun

ONE UNIVERSITY CRESCENT

Presentation centre: 301 – 9380 University Crescent, UniverCity at Simon Fraser University

Hours: Noon – 5 p.m., Sat – Thu

Telephone: 604-294-2560

Web: oneuniversitycrescent.com

Project size: 2 buildings, 113 residences

Residence size: 887 sq.ft. – 2,096 sq.ft.

Prices: 2 bedrooms from $349,900; 3 bedrooms from $439,900

Developer: Millennium University Homes Ltd.

Architect: Lawrence Doyle, Lawrence Doyle Architect Inc.; Stuart Lyon, Gomberoff Bell Lyon Group

Interior design: Mitchell Freedland

Warranty: National

Let us now reflect on the malleability and mutability of the English language, our reading this weekend the offer from developer and marketer of “townhouse-style homes in the sky” at the One University Crescent new-home project.

Anything or anybody up Burnaby Mountain is located above most of us. A home “in the sky” is, accordingly, figuratively incontrovertible.

It’s the possibility that a One University Crescent apartment approximates a townhouse that really intrigues or, to paraphrase Bob Rennie, provokes.

The definition of townhouse, or townhome, in the Internet dictionaries do and do not help. Let’s call these dictionary, or theoretical, qualities of the townhouse the Atlantic world’s expectations of a townhouse.

Most of the dictionaries put first meaning on the words’ genteel origins. ”. . . the city residence of one having a country seat or having a chief residence elsewhere . . . ‘stayed at their town house during the social season.’ ”

The dictionary townhouse is located in a ”fashionable” neighbourhood; ”is joined to another house” by either one or two common walls or sidewalls; and consists of two or more floors. Interestingly, none of the dictionaries explicity mention entrances and exits at the street as a townhouse component

All the One University Crescent residences are located in a two-building compound, their fashionableness manifested by a gatekeeper at the entrance to the underground parking and by electronic cards that govern access to the buildings and movement around. All have one or two common walls. Most, however, are one-floor homes, the exception a few ground-floor residences with a “studio” down. And most, of course, do not have any entrances or exits at the street. They are located in multi-floor buildings.

Now let’s look at the townhouse here and now and let’s call these in-practice qualities our Pacific world’s expectations of a townhouse.

Expansive glazing front and back on the living and sleeping levels is standard in new townhouses in these parts, the purpose the circulation of natural light and breezes.

Further, minimal barriers to circulation of natural light and breezes is standard in the living levels of new townhouses hereabouts.

In other words, projection inward of the outdoors, of our enchanting natural light and our sea and mountain breezes, is standard practice in new-townhouse construction in these parts.

That infusion of natural light and breeze, Bob Rennie says, is one of the local townhouse standards Millennium and its architects included in the One University Crescent design.

The other, he says, is the privacy of the principal entrances. There are only two to a floor, an approximation of the typical two-to-a-front-porch townhouse arrangement hereabouts.

This was achieved through the inclusion of elevators in sufficient number to serve only one to three residences on each floor.

There are no long corridors on the upper floors, no grand lobby on the ground floor. There are, however, lobbies or landings on each floor, including the ground floor, from which residents will either take an elevator up to or down from their apartments.

”The unique thing about a townhouse is not only the presence of the residents’ own front door, but light front and back,” Rennie says. ”That’s the message we’re trying to get across here, that there’s seven different entrances, seven different elevator banks.

”So when you come in to ‘your’ entrance and ‘your’ elevator, you will go up, and other than at the ends of the buildings, ‘your’ elevator, ‘your’ floor will serve only two units and you will come into your unit and you will have this light back and front. . . .

”We’re using ‘townhome-style in the sky’ to try to get that across. It’s to provoke the question, what’s different about [One University Crescent].”

Dean Punzo, a 42-year-old businessman, certainly found the offer of natural light back and front and the two-to-a-landing entrances different enough to help him decide to buy an OUC apartment.

”The convenience, [the] unique look and spaciousness of the building[s] and the over-all layout were very appealing,” he said in an interview.

A Vancouver native and, until he takes up residency in OUC, a north Burnaby resident, Dean reports that the mountaintop location of OUC was another important draw. ”Working in downtown Vancouver is great and very hustle-bustle, but afterwards I prefer to escape to a place that is scenic, quiet and peaceful. I hope OUC will retain this type of feel . . . .”

Did proximity to the Simon Fraser University campus play any role in his decision to buy at OUC? None, he reports.

(That should make for an interesting exchange, if or when the school’s president invites his neighbours over for drinks in the university’s presidential residence, an OUC penthouse.)

After place — almost a townhouse near the top of a local mountain and, therefore, in the sky when not in the clouds — time is another reason One University Crescent is different, Bob Rennie says of his latest collaboration with Millennium. Owners are moving in now; buyers could move in shortly.

” . . . look through your newspaper and you won’t know until you get there that this building or that building won’t be ready for 18 months to 36 months,” he says, acknowledging he’s a ”guilty” participant in showhome-as-surrogate pre-sell campaigning.

”Here, we’re building [Buildings] One and Two and we’re just going to receive occupants in Building Two. So you can walk it; you can feel it; you can look at the views; you can experience the two-condominiums-to-an-elevator layout; and make your decision.”

It’s not that the local buyer is, or is becoming, ”uncomfortable” with pre-sale marketing, he says. (The pre-sale is at least 20 years old in the Lower Mainland and has not only survived the condominium-construction crisis of the previous decade, but is flourishing in this decade.)

It’s instead an appeal to the more likely OUC buyer, an older buyer who will sell one home to generate the cash for the OUC home. ” ‘I’ve just sold my house; I don’t want to move twice.’ Or . . . ‘I don’t want to sell my house until I know exactly what I’m moving into.’ It’s appealing to that demographic.”

Buyer Dean Punzo, by the way, is not of that demographic. The ”move in now” status of the OUC homes did not figure in his decision to buy there, he reports.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

 

Sun

Stories are going around the project could have chosen a quieter method of pile-driving

Frances Bula
Sun

Art Kelm has a few suggestions for the Vancouver convention-centre expansion — or, as he calls it, “this insane project.”

Number 1: That “the architect and all the people involved in the approval of the design and construction should be forced to attend at the site and listen to the pounding of every single one of these piles.”

Number 2: That the B.C. Assessment Authority send one of its assessors “to attend in the front of my apartment building for one week, Monday to Saturday, 10 hours a day. Then have him visualize this mental torture for 40 or 50 times this period, and prepare a written report advising whether in her/his opinion an assessment resulting in an annual levy of $6,200 in property taxes for a 1,600-square-foot condo is fair and equitable.”

Number 3: That Vancouver city council direct the region’s chief medical health officer do the same kind of assessment, to assess the “threat of harm to my mental and physical health as a result of this madness.”

You guessed it. Art Kelm is one very unhappy guy.

He and his wife, Mary Lewis, live in a condo on the northeast corner of the Carina building, which gives them a ringside seat at the construction site.

Kelm, a retired accountant, and Lewis, a retired doctor, moved to Vancouver to get away from the snow in Winnipeg.

“When you don’t have to stay there for the winter, you don’t” is his cost-benefit analysis of Winnipeg.

Until this year, they were thrilled with their new home.

Now, Kelm is spending his time writing angry letters. He has no problem with normal construction noise, he points out. After all, he’s lived in Coal Harbour for seven years, during which he has had one tower or another under construction most of the time.

But the convention centre is a different story, with its 1,000 piles that are eight storeys high.

“Has there ever been anything like it in the city of Vancouver history?” he writes in his forceful way in one of his many letters. “For this reason, I believe you have to treat this as a special situation that has to be addressed in an abnormal fashion.”

He is particularly conscious of the noise because he is retired, which means he gets to listen to it all day long.

What really sent him around the bend was the recent news that the pile-driving, which was supposed to end in December, is going to be extended until next May because of difficult soil conditions.

In the letters that he’s about to send off to all and sundry, Kelm is asking for some kind of relief: tax relief, alternate housing or “anything that will permit me to survive the up to one year of constant pile-driving.”

But he also hints darkly that it didn’t have to be like this. The rumour going around among residents and office tenants is that the project could have chosen a quieter method of pile-driving, but chose not to because it would cost more money.

Project manager Russ Anthony sighs just the tiniest bit when I ask him whether there’s any truth to this nefarious-sounding story.

“Yes, the rumour was going around that we can vibrate the piles in.”

Anthony says that piles can be vibrated in where the soil conditions are right. That’s not the case for most of the convention-centre site.

There’s another rumour that the pile-drivers could have baffles put on them to muffle the sound.

And there have been other theories and suggestions circulating about other sound-reducing techniques the project could use but isn’t.

But, he says, “they either don’t work or they don’t provide the benefits people think. There is no solution.”

You don’t have to take just Anthony’s word for it.

The project is about to have its annual general meeting on Nov. 15, where, he says, “we’re going to bring all these geotechies out” to talk to the neighbourhood’s cranky residents about pile-driving techniques. (For the record, it’s me who’s saying they’re cranky, not Anthony, a professional bureaucrat who would never use such a word even under torture, so don’t send him any hate mail.)

But Anthony swears that there aren’t that many unhappy locals. According to him, Kelm is one of only about half a dozen people who call regularly to complain.

Apparently, everyone else has adjusted.

We’ll find out. The annual general meeting is at 3 p.m., somewhere in the existing convention centre — watch for the advertisements announcing it.

Or you could always just call me, your convention-centre monitor: 604-605-2366. I’m lonely and I’d like to talk to you.

Michael Sasges
Sun

CAMERA

Location: Eighth and Pine, Vancouver

Presentation centre address: 1523 West Eighth (at Granville)

Hours: Noon – 5 p.m., Sat – Thu

Telephone: 604-733-1574

Web: cameraliving.com

Project size: 77 apartments and townhouses, 10-storey building

Residence size: 1 bedroom + den: 2 bedrooms; and 2 bedrooms + den

Prices: 1 bedroom and den, from $314,900; 2, from $449,900; 2 + den, from $518,900; townhouses from $524,900

Developer: Intracorp

Architect: Ramsay Worden

Interior design: BBA Design Consultants

Warranty: St Paul Guarantee

Construction completion: Winter, 2007

If you were a developer intent on bringing to market a new-home project you wanted to call Camera, wouldn’t you do everything possible to ensure people could never, ever say your creation wasn’t picture perfect?

What you do, firstly, is commission the best of the best locally to get the design right, building and homes.

That’s, of course, what Intracorp did by involving two much honoured and internationally commissioned designers, Ramsay Worden Architects for the building and BBA Design Consultants for the interiors.

The North Shore mountains, English Bay and the downtown towers to the north, and below, and leafy, manorial Shaughnessy to the south, and above, the Camera building will be punctuated by glazing and patios, balconies, terraces and rooftop decks.

Preliminary reviews, let’s call them non-market reviews, are positive: ”well resolved . . . building form . . . fairly consistent with guidelines . . . an attractive project . . . a very attractive project . . . good addition to the neighbourhood . . . (city hall’s Development Permit Board, August, 2005).

Inside, BBA put a lot of thought into ensuring the homes will have the flexibility their owners can use to create space for a home office, a tech centre or, as in the show home, a wine bar, Camera publicist Pamela Groberman reports.

The stone ‘n’ steel content includes a stainless steel refrigerator from a Sub Zero and stainless steel gas cook top and convection wall oven and dishwasher from Bosch.

Composite stone will top the kitchen counters; marble, the vanities.

And for pure luxury, a two-head shower head, from a company called Taju.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

 

Straw-bale houses are durable, super energy-efficient and a less expensive way to build — pity the three little pigs didn’t know about them

Sherry Noik-Bent
Sun

Building a home out of straw didn’t work out so well for the three little pigs. But construction with straw has come a long way, producing homes that are super energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and cost the same as, or even less than, conventional homes. And best of all, they look good.

David and Anne-Marie Warburton had been looking for a cost-efficient building method that was in line with their environmental values. Shortly after they first saw a straw-bale structure in New Mexico, they met architect Linda Chapman, who suggested it for their home.

“There are no accidents,” says David Warburton. “If we hadn’t seen that wall in New Mexico, we probably wouldn’t have gone with it. We had that 30-second glimpse at a straw-bale wall; we knew what she was talking about.”

Their two-storey, 2,460-square-foot home near Orangeville, Ont., shows how a straw-bale home can be designed in the style of an Adirondack chalet, with its colourfully painted gables on a steep-pitched roof and interior nooks and alcoves. The decor is casual comfort, suitable for a family that includes two kids and three dogs and an eclectic collection of accessories.

Still, David Warburton recognizes this atypical building method may not be for everyone. “People seem to fall on one or the other side of the fence about this kind of building: Either they get madly excited or they just don’t get it.”

The walls are made of bales of tightly compressed straw — an abundant and renewable resource that would otherwise be discarded as waste — stacked as building blocks, then plastered or stuccoed on both the interior and exterior. Building this way gives the structure exceptional strength, so nothing will blow this house down.

The bales offer great “sculptability,” allowing the homeowners to carve arched doors, built-in bench seats and deep-framed windows into their 25-inch thickness.

Using 800 bales at a cost of about $1.50 apiece, the Warburtons saved tens of thousands on the cost of construction materials. And superior thermal insulation provided by bale walls has saved them a great deal in annual energy costs since they moved in in 1998.

Their experience is backed up by research from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that shows bale homes typically use 25 to 45 per cent less heating and cooling energy than their frame-walled equivalents.

The many advantages of straw-bale homes are drawing more people, according to the Ontario Straw Bale Building Coalition (OSBBC), which says more than 100 such homes were built in Ontario in the past five years. The non-profit OSBBC offers information and resources on straw-bale building at strawbalebuilding.ca.

But, as the Warburtons discovered, that didn’t mean it was smooth sailing. In order to obtain a mortgage on their home, they spent five years making their way down a list of banks before they were finally approved.

While the environmental and cost-saving benefits are what initially attracted this back-to-the-land baby boom couple, it was the flexibility of design that appeals to others.

That’s apparent in the contrast between the Warburtons’ rustic home and the ultra-modern one built by Glen Hunter and Joanne Sokolowski in Cavan, Ont., outside Peterborough, Ont. Finished in grey stucco, the home is distinguished by a 19-foot-high glass gallery that extends the entire length of the south elevation, topped by a sloping roof.

It’s a shocker, coming as it does at the end of a winding 110-metre gravel drive through cornfields.

“It just shows that you don’t have to have an adobe house when you have a straw-bale house,” Sokolowski says. “You can do anything with it.”

Inside, gleaming white walls were achieved with a mix of plaster and marble dust. Engineered-wood ceiling beams and columns delineate the spaces of the single-storey open layout into a living room, kitchen, child’s play area and home office, making it easy for Sokolowski to keep an eye on her two-year-old at all times. The master bedroom and baby’s nursery are tucked behind a long nine-foot-high bookcase. Sokolowski describes it as “almost like having a loft in the middle of the country.”

Indeed, urban loft dwellers would envy the super-sleek pendant fixtures that light up the gallery’s wall of windows at night.

Despite the striking differences between these two homes, both have a “truth window” — a cutout in the wall that shows the straw beneath. This is a feature of every straw-bale home, says Warburton, “for the skeptics who don’t quite believe.”

WEB SITES:

www.sustainableworks.ca

www.thelaststraw.org

www.bigbadwolf.ca

www.ecobuilding.org/lib/ebt/1999/bcstraw.htm

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

 

Other

With more than 3,000 multi-family (mostly high-rise condominiums) housing starts through the first nine month of this year, Vancouver is now dominated by strata construction. So far this year, starts of condominiums and townhomes are running nearly eight times above the pace of construction for single-detached houses, which have accounted for just 401 starts, reports Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Yet, 

Province

TORONTO — Vancouver will take the No. 1 spot in Canada‘s housing market next year, while Toronto and Montreal will watch housing starts dwindle, according to a national forecast released yesterday.

Construction began on about 19,400 homes in Vancouver last year. The Clayton Housing Report forecasts that number will fall to 19,100 this year, but rebound to 21,100 in 2006 as employment growth strengthens. Vancouver is posting a 12.7-per-cent increase in housing prices so far this year.

Calgary will also see a construction lift, going from 14,100 starts this year to 14,800 next, as a shortage of existing houses for sale pushes more buyers to consider buying new.

But all of the other major markets have passed their prime.

“Of note is the sharp decline in Toronto which is linked to the emerging land shortages,” it added. Last year, 42,100 homes were started, and that should decrease slightly to 41,200 this year. In 2006, Clayton predicts starts will drop to 34,700.

In the first nine months of this year, Toronto saw housing prices rise 6.9 per cent, the report said.

Montreal is experiencing a steady decline in starts, moving from 28,700 last year, to 24,100 this year and 19,300 next. Prices have appreciated 7.7 per cent.

Edmonton, Regina, Ottawa and Halifax will also see starts fall next year, while Winnipeg should hold steady for the third year in a row at 2,500, the report said.

© The Vancouver Province 2005