Roadblocks could delay, or even kill, planned ParaYso Hotel
Bruce Constantineau
Sun
Graham Alexander wants to build downtown Vancouver‘s newest boutique hotel — a 14-storey, 91-suite development on a site now occupied by a vacant retail building at 620 Seymour Street.
He even has a name for the $27-million proposal — the ParaYso Hotel Vancouver.
Alexander is president and majority owner of Rancho Santa Monica Developments, which recently bought the Seymour property from Taiwanese owners for $5.5 million.
“It’s the perfect time for a project like this,” he said in an interview. “Downtown hotel occupancy levels are around 71 or 72 per cent, and the after-boom of the Olympics should make things even stronger.”
Alexander proposes to begin construction by the summer of 2009, with completion by the summer of 2011.
But there are potential roadblocks that could delay or even kill the project. Alexander needs to raise about $7.7 million over the next year to make the deal work, and he’s trying to do that through a limited partnership and a share issue.
He also needs city approval, and planners say the project still requires considerable analysis and design work before it can proceed.
“Given the small size of this site, there will be challenges with respect to proposed use, parking, height, massing and possibly other issues,” city development planner Bob Adair said in an e-mail Friday.
The site has 15.24 metres (50 feet) of frontage on Seymour Street.
Alexander, a former stockbroker who completed a 32-lot residential project in Chilliwack in 2006 and a hotel development in Tulum, Mexico last year, said he wanted to include a residential component in the Seymour project, but the city has a moratorium on condo projects in that part of town.
He said he still hopes to increase the number of floors and hotel rooms in the project.
If it goes ahead, the ParaYso Hotel would be one of the few hotel-only projects to be built in the city in several years. Two other Vancouver boutique hotels under construction — the Loden (opening this summer) and the Shangri-La (opening early next year) — are part of major mixed-use condo/hotel developments.
Vancouver hotel industry consultant Angus Wilkinson said the 600-block Seymour is an “evolving location”, and not one that would obviously attract upscale boutique hotel customers.
“That whole area is still in a state of redevelopment. And with just 91 units, I don’t know how you make the numbers work to make it an economic proposition,” he said. “It’s hard to make an economic case for anything under 100 rooms.”
Wilkinson noted economic realities have forced restaurateur Umberto Menghi to delay or abandon his plan to build a 16-storey, 40-unit hotel next to his Il Giardino restaurant on Hornby Street.
A proposed first-year budget for the ParaYso Hotel forecasts monthly occupancy rates ranging from 68 to 92 per cent, and average room rates ranging from $200 to $265.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
