Just a side note: I will be so happy when I get to write fewer stories about the city’s kooky real-estate market. But, now, in the meantime …
Lots of chattering these days about the high prices that key pieces of Vancouver commercial real-estate are going for: Royal Centre, $400-million to a German investor. Bayshore, $300-million to Concord Pacific. The Denny’s restaurant site on Broadway, $500 a buildable square foot.
All of that is mysterious enough. On top of that, various reporters have latched on to another puzzling phenomenon, which is a couple of local companies that appear to have businesses going “crowd funding” real-estate purchases. Solicitations for investors for the Molson’s brewery site and a Nelson Street site have been dug up in recent weeks, with various promises in the solicitations, which appeared to be linked to a company called Sun Commercial, about what kind of redevelopment is possible on the sites. (Sam Cooper at The Province was the first to spot this.)
The B.C. Securities Commission got involved to find out whether this was a violation of any rules on raising money from investors. In the meantime, councillors and planners are mystified and not sure whether these buyers will know, when they arrive at city hall, that rezoning is going to be complicated or downright impossible. My story, detailing some of the saga of what’s been going on, is here. (Don’t be put off by the inaccurate headline.)
I should point out that, at the moment, no one seems to know whether anyone did actually invest anything. All we know is these weird solicitations appeared on various social media locations.
One set of companies that got caught up in the reporting and securities commission review, Luxmore Realty and Canada Luxmore Crowdfunding, has been trying to set the record straight, at least about what its company is doing. Luxmore, which hasn’t been pitching any big Vancouver properties to my knowledge, doesn’t raise money directly or “crowd fund” in the Canadian sense of the word.
Instead, as Luxmore rep Jason Liu said, what it means in his operation is explaining to people what kinds of investments are out there (real estate and otherwise) and then encouraging them, if they’re interested, to find other interested investors and form legal partnerships so they can invest as a group.
Whatever is going on, Vancouver’s market continues to get weirder … and not in the fun, Austin sense.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Kirk // Feb 2, 2016 at 4:38 pm
If you’re a Vancouver city reporter and not writing about real estate, that pretty much leaves just the Canucks and the DTES. Actually, some people are saying the Canucks ownership was a real estate play too — whoever bought the Canucks also got the rights to develop the lands around the arena, which is happening now. And, the DTES is, of course, turning into a real estate story too. Even our art gallery has turned into a real estate story. So, I, um, will just stop there before I depress us all… 🙁
Anyone see this? We always talk about the choice between living in the city vs commuting in the suburbs. Someone always asks, “How much is your time worth?” Well, apparently, it’s $68k/year! Holy crap!!!
http://www.moneysense.ca/property/sell/city-or-suburbs-what-it-takes-to-live-in-downtown-vancouver/
And, click the link on the bottom of that page for Calgary. How much are commercial properties selling for over there?
2 penguinstorm // Feb 3, 2016 at 8:45 pm
“Just a side note: I will be so happy when I get to write fewer stories about the city’s kooky real-estate market”
So you’re moving somewhere else? Sucks. You’ll be a big loss to Vancouver’s journalistic integrity.
3 penguinstorm // Feb 3, 2016 at 8:46 pm
Same conversation happened in Toronto in the 1970s, it just wasn’t happening in real time with a 24 hours global news cycle. Suck it up Vancouverites: live where you can afford, find a job you love, commute if you want to. It’s not such a hard knock life after all.
4 Kirk // Feb 5, 2016 at 11:01 am
Bah! Even our high tech sector is now about real estate. As Silly Season pointed out recently, Ryan Holmes recently partnered with Ian Gillespie to buy a whole city block of commercial land.
http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2015/12/mount-pixel-vancouver-digital-campus-main-street/
Now, a month later, Holmes releases an editorial asking the city to rezone more industrial and commercial districts to allow more residential buildings.
http://www.theprovince.com/business/ryan+holmes+hootsuite+without+affordable+housing+vancouver+risks+becoming+economic+ghost/11696052/story.html
You know, I’m fine with that, but my point is that pretty much everything here revolves around real estate.
Even our media outlets like Vancity Buzz and Vancouver is Awesome have been dragged into the whole real estate advertorial debate. There’s no escaping it. Getting way tiresome.
5 Sharon Townsend // Feb 9, 2016 at 3:57 pm
I wonder if we will see a time when city staff and elected officials are subjected to huge financial incentives to modify zoning etc. to realize those misleading promises of ‘no risk’ and ‘view property residential’ zoning.
6 Kirk // Feb 11, 2016 at 6:46 pm
Oh FFS, even Grant Lawrence is writing about real estate. Everyone is an expert now.
http://www.westender.com/news-issues/vancouver-shakedown/the-dirty-truth-about-vancouver-real-estate-1.2169617