Malcolm Parry
Sun

A rendering shows what Arthur Erickson’s Residences at the Ritz-Carlton tower will look like.

ARCHITECT HONOURED: Arthur Erickson received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s 2007 Prix du XXe Siecle award for “enduring excellence and national significance to Canadian architecture.”

An even more tangible and enduring tribute will follow. That’ll be when Simon Lim’s Holborn Holdings firm completes the Residences at The Ritz-Carlton tower on West Georgia Street, a half-block west of Erickson’s late-1960s masterpiece, the Macmillan-Bloedel Building, and alongside Lim’s Terasen Gas Building.

That’s the site of the old Shell Oil office Lim bought from Cadillac Fairview in 2004, long after plans for the ritzy, Hong Kong-based Newport Club fizzled.

“Arthur should be on our skyline,” Lim said recently of the 60-floor building that will contain 130 hotel rooms and 123 residences ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 square feet and fetching up to $13 million each.

The city’s urban design panel earlier rejected a proposal that would have put a Musson Cattell Mackey design on the city skyline.

Brought in to join MCM and the Davidson Yuen Simpson practice, Erickson got the nod for a twisting tower that met city hall’s view-cone requirements while benefiting the developer. That’s because its rotation will enhance the harbour-mountain view for upper-floor residents, who’ll pay more for it. Condo sales mogul Bob Rennie, who “brokered” the Erickson deal, joked that the latter “earned every dollar of his outrageous fee.”

Lim, who shares a June 4 birthday with Rennie, makes self-deprecating jokes about himself. Wearing a sweater with the emblem of his then-favourite Bentley automobile, Lim said he dropped in unexpectedly at one of Bentley owner Rennie’s sales events. He was met by a staffer with: “Are you here to pick up Bob’s car?”

Lim, who says he’s his Malaysia-based family’s “head janitor” here, has picked up more than that. “Bob made me buy the Bay Parkade site,” said Lim of the $62-million Georgia-Seymour-Dunsmuir-Richards Street property. “It was a lot of money, and the city had been talking about no more development in the downtown core. But Bob said: ‘Buy it and figure it out later,’ And, you know what, it’s my best purchase ever.”

Lim even bought the Kingsway-at-Nanaimo Eldorado hotel, where Rennie’s mother Margaret was a restaurant server. Holborn plans to develop the $270-million, 22-floor, 350-unit The Hills project there. It is also one of 20 candidates for redevelopment of the Little Mountain pubic-housing site, which, depending on final zoning, is valued around $100 million.

His firm got that name because Holborn station was where Lim caught the “tube” while studying at London‘s Middle Temple law school. Other enterprises are named from A to F stations, so let’s guess the next Lim incorporates will be Greenwich.

Lim, who was the first North American developer Ritz-Carlton permitted to dictate suite sizes, is “talking about” another such collaboration in Calgary.

He also has plans “still marinating” for the 12-acre tennis-court site in Whistler Village. That $375-million-range project should include a 350,000-square-foot hotel, 220,000 square feet of town-homes and 50,000 of other amenities. In Squamish, the 200-house University Heights and 200-acre Thunderbird Creek projects are joint ventures with First Cambridge Capital (Douglas Day) and Rick Ilich’s Townline firm.

No word on Erickson’s involvement. But he’ll be on our skyline for sure.

Numbers are up 18 per cent over 2006, but fewer buildings change hands

Sun

Prices that building owners pay for rental apartments in Vancouver are up 18 per cent over 2006, at the same time that the number of apartment buildings sold in the city has fallen about 25 per cent, according to the Goodman Report.

Based on 2007 sales of apartment buildings up to Oct. 31, the average suite in Vancouver sold for $184,644, an increase of 18 per cent over 2006 prices. In the suburbs of Metro Vancouver, the average apartment price rose nine per cent to $118,000.

However, the number of sales fell from last year. Authors of the report, David and Mark Goodman of Macdonald Commercial R.E.S. Ltd., project there will be 60 apartment building sales in Vancouver by the end of the calendar year, down significantly from last year’s 81 sales. Within the suburbs, sales of rental buildings are expected to reach the same number as last year’s 83 buildings.

In Vancouver, the biggest changes have occurred in Kitsilano, where sales in the first 10 months of the year totalled five buildings, compared to eight in 2006, and prices rose more than 35 per cent, from $167,956 to $236,413. In Marpole, sales in the first 10 months totalled just five buildings, compared to 14 for all of 2006, and prices rose from $114,903 to $143,990.

Vancouver’s east side was the busiest area for apartment sales, with 15 buildings totalling 292 units sold in the first 10 months of this year (with an average suite price of $122,349), followed by the West End, with 12 buildings totalling 397 units (average suite price of $212,003).

Outside city limits, Burnaby was the busiest area, with sales of 29 buildings totalling 631 suites. The average suite price in Burnaby was $124,264.

David Goodman, co-author of the report, does not foresee much change for Lower Mainland renters who, facing a vacancy rate of less than one per cent in the city, don’t have a lot of apartments to choose from.

“Rental buildings are a vanishing breed,” said Goodman. “Many of these old apartment buildings are 40 years old and they’re becoming troublesome for the owners because of the high cost of maintaining them.”

Overall, he sees a cooling off of a market that has been busy for the last six years.

“We are finally beginning to see a peaking of the market,” said Goodman. “Typically things slow down before Christmas, but we’ve noticed in the past two or three weeks a dramatic slowdown in activity.

“I think the market is catching its breath. Investors are looking over their shoulder and watching what’s happening in the States, and people are just sort of sitting back and watching the market.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

‘People were expecting things were going to slow down,’ real estate expert says of PricewaterhouseCoopers report

Michael Kane
Sun

The Metro Vancouver market is absorbing high- rise condos faster than developers can start them, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers Greater Vancouver Condominium Quarterly Sales Update. Over the first seven months of 2007, developers started about 1,000 fewer units than were absorbed. Absorptions averaged 565 units per month and starts averaged 430 units per month. This chart shows highrise condo inventory down significantly from the start of 2007, but creeping upward again as starts begin to overtake sales heading into the third quarter.

Condominium sales in Metro Vancouver slumped by a third between July and September as developers poured new product into the marketplace, according to report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

However, the market is pretty well balanced and sales are expected to pick up, Neil Atchison, a real estate specialist with the consulting firm, said Wednesday. “But we’re not clear on whether it will be at the torrid rate that they have been in the past.”

PwC released its third-quarter condo sales update on the same day as Re/Max Canada reported that unit sales for the region are up seven per cent over the first nine months of the year, compared to the same period last year.

Re/Max says 50 per cent of all sales activity in downtown Vancouver can be linked to investors, suggesting that demand and prices in Metro’s heartland will remain strong in the absence of an economic downturn.

Developers in Metro Vancouver began marketing 3,765 new apartment and townhouse condos during the third quarter, an increase of 29 per cent from the previous three months, according to PwC.

However, “demand slumped,” with preliminary figures showing condo sales dipped by 33 per cent from the previous quarter, Atchison said.

“I think developers held off putting in new product until the third quarter of this year because they weren’t sure where the market was going. People were expecting that things were going to slow down this year,” he said.

“I think the developers have managed their inventory well, and now they have more confidence that demand seems to be more sustained than the pundits had expected.”

While unsold inventory increased in Burnaby-New Westminster, sales in downtown Vancouver and the West End area kept pace with new product coming on the market.

Metro Vancouver remains the strongest condo market in the country, with 60 per cent of all sales falling into that category, according to the Re/Max Condominium Report.

Year-to-date, average prices are up 14 per cent for townhouses and 11 per cent for apartments while Vancouver set a new $18-million benchmark for the most expensive apartment-style condominium unit ever sold through the Multiple Listing Service.

In addition to investors, demand for condos is being driven by both first-time buyers looking for a foothold in the market and baby boomers looking for a lifestyle change as they move toward retirement, said Elton Ash, regional vice-president for Re/Max Western Canada.

He said the impact of “quick-flip” speculation in Canada‘s largest condominium markets has yet to be determined but investors who are looking to hold their properties for one to five years are helping to drive construction activity.

“Investors are anticipating demand will continue, which we certainly also feel, and they are looking for a good return on their investment,” Ash said in an interview. “So they are affecting the market by simply absorbing the available inventory and thereby keeping prices strong.”

He said the market is also being supported by consumer confidence, affordable interest rates and B.C.’s robust economy.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Developer commits $15 million to purchasing and $750,000 to training 100 staff

Frances Bula
Sun

VANCOUVER – The company building Vancouver’s Olympic athletes’ village has agreed to try to buy $15 million worth of goods from “inner-city” businesses, hire 100 people who live in the inner city, and pay $750,000 to help with pre-employment training.

The agreement is between Millennium Development and Building Opportunities with Business — BOB — a city non-profit agency set up to try to channel Olympics-related purchases to inner-city businesses.

BOB is funded by the city, provincial and federal governments.

It’s all part of the city’s original “inner-city inclusivity” promise in its Games bid to make sure the 2010 Olympics benefit the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

The agreement, which will be made public today, was welcomed by both Mayor Sam Sullivan and his political opposition, which originally made the commitment when it controlled city council.

“I think this will be a very important legacy,” said Sullivan. “Having people from the inner city benefiting is great. I’m very pleased that this project will be a socially sustainable one, as well as environmentally and financially.”

Vision Vancouver Coun. Raymond Louie also said he was pleased. “I think it’s a very good step to make [the Games] lasting, so it’s not just a handout, but a hand up,” he said. “This is an example of what can be done and it’s a result of our work last term.”

Vancouver is the first city to make a commitment to host “socially sustainable” Olympics Games and to try to ensure that its inner-city neighbourhoods get some of the benefits from what has often been seen as a mega-event that has a mainly negative effect on low-cost housing and the lives of low-income people.

Deputy city manager Jody Andrews, in a memo to council members about the agreement, said the city has also been trying to fulfil the social part of its commitment in other ways.

Because the city’s bidding process encourages companies to hire aboriginals and inner-city residents, he noted that the Southeast False Creek project has seen an aboriginal company provide $250,000 worth of gravel and an aboriginal foreshore-site administrator, along with a group from the inner city doing landscaping.

The inner city is defined as the Downtown Eastside, the Downtown South and Mount Pleasant.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Reports show strong market in decline

Paul Luke
Province

Clouds are darkening the court of Canada’s condo kingdom.

Greater Vancouver can lay claim to having the nation’s strongest condominium market, with condos accounting for 60 per cent of all sales in the area, Re/Max said in a report released yesterday. But strong or not, demand for condos in the Vancouver area has been plunging, according to a separate report released yesterday by PricewaterhouseCoopers said.

Condo sales in Greater Vancouver fell by 33 per cent from the previous quarter, the PWC report said. Sales of low-rise condo units plummeted by almost 60 per cent to 620 units from 1,480 in the second quarter.

“The second-quarter low-rise sales figure was probably a reflection of pent-up demand in the southeast suburban markets that has now been met,” PWC said. “Average asking prices for low-rise condos were down during the third quarter, as demand slowed.”

The unsold inventory of highrise condos in Burnaby and New Westminster rose to 825 units at the end of September from 315 units in early July. “Sales in the downtown-west end area managed to keep pace with new product coming on the market during this period,” PWC said.

Re/Max’s report paints a far brighter picture of the Greater Vancouver condo market. In the first 10 months of the year, average prices for townhomes rose 14 per cent to $475,350. Average apartment prices for the same period climbed 11 per cent to $381,600, Re/Max said.

Year-to-date condo sales for the Vancouver area are up seven per cent to 20,221 units. Vancouver‘s strong market has attracted speculators, who now account for up to 50 per cent of sales in the downtown core, Re/Max said.

“The impact of speculation, especially in Canada’s largest condominium markets has yet to be determined but concerns for the future are relevant,” said Elton Ash, Re/Max regional executive vice-president of Western Canada.

“This is a major factor that could influence prices in years to come,” he said.

The top end of the Vancouver market is especially robust, with 453 condos worth more than $1 million changing hands this year, compared with 303 in 2006. Vancouver‘s highest-price condo changed hands earlier this year for $18 million — a 7,400-square-foot penthouse suite at the private residences at Hotel Georgia.

© The Vancouver Province 2007