Property developer starts with Yaletown residential unit and now has $700-million empire

Malcolm Parry
Sun

Auto racer Will Lin’s Rize Alliance Properties will build the $70-million Roston tower on the Cecil Hotel site and refurbish the adjacent Yale Hotel.

HOW WILL LIN WINS: Tires have squealed beside the Cecil Hotel since 1954, when the then-new Granville Street Bridge’s exit ramp brushed its south wall. Hotel and ramp will be razed soon. But rubber will still burn for Will Lin, 44, who’ll build the $70-million, 187-unit Rolston tower on the site that cost him $10.5 million and has been rezoned from 5 to 8.25 FSR (floor space ratio).

That’s because the Rize Alliance Properties Ltd CEO/founder spends some of his spare time racing 1995 Porsche 943 and 1992 BMW 325i cars. He also “tracks” a Honda CBR 600 motorcycle, meaning running it at race speeds without competing. As well, his home garage houses a Triumph Thruxton, Ducati 848 SS, BMW 1300 GT and — “my first girlfriend” — a 1985 Suzuki GSXR-750 motorcycle. There’s a Porsche Panamera sedan on order.

Motorhead ways aside, Lin will build the Rolston to LEED Gold environmental specifications, and renovate the adjacent Yale hotel and its SRA (Single Room Occupancy) rooms. The Yale’s famed blues pub, but not the Cecil’s stripper bar, will live on in a deal that enables vendor Wade Luciak to acquire 10 per cent of the completed complex.

Designed by HBI/IB Architects, the project brings Lin back within a block of the one that got him started in 1992. That development, at Hamilton and Drake Street, also involved its vendor, when John White and Lin put up $350,000 each. Lin got his stake from his Taiwanese physician-father, Chao Chi Lin, and Citizen’s Bank loaned $1.1 million. Eleven live-work units and two retail units sold for some $200-per-square-foot, Lin recalled, smiling.

With cash flowing, Lin eventually bought “seven or eight” buildings, mostly in burgeoning Yaletown, and sold them during the 2006-2008 “heyday” before prices nosedived. But his high-rise-development breakthrough was the 1995 Richards-at-Davie Metropolis. That project incorporated the old Canadian Linen facility’s facade, and had some three-quarters of its 99 units built as 16-foot-ceiling lofts. He’s still flabbergasted that Scotiabank’s now-senior VP, Michele Kwok, saw the Metropolis presentation centre and volunteered a $25-million loan. “I was 29 years old, and didn’t have a broker or anything,” Lin said. “If only that would happen nowadays.”

What did happen is that Lin “learned that we were able to preserve heritage buildings and get heritage density from city hall to sell to recipient sites.” Case in point: The 1930s Art-Deco-style London Building at 626 West Pender Street. It yielded 80,000 square feet of density Lin sold to Delta Land Development’s Bruce Langereis for the Urban Fare market in that firm’s Cielo development.

Today, Rize (say Rice) has $700-million-worth of projects on the go and turns over some $140 million annually. That’s some journey from his $1.9-million kickoff in still-nascent Yaletown, when passersby asked: “Another warehouse?”

“No. It’s residential,” Lin replied.

“Good luck,” many said. –

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