Bowen, Ambleside, Waterfront trial one year away

Frank Luba
Province

A TransLink test of a new SeaBus route is coming within the next 12 months, according to the chairman of the Lower Mainland transportation authority.

Speaking yesterday at the Urban Transportation Forum in Vancouver, Doug McCallum revealed that a pilot project is planned for the run from Bowen Island to Ambleside in West Vancouver and then on to Waterfront Centre.

TransLink had initially identified 24 potential ferry terminals from Snug Cove to Belcarra and Jericho on a variety of routes. The list was pared down to four routes, with the Snug Cove to Ambleside to Waterfront in Vancouver being judged most viable.

“We’re sort of in the preliminary stage,” said McCallum, a long-time booster of marine transit. “We have to look at a lot better water taxis, a better use of waterways, instead of looking at water as a hindrance in our area.”

A TransLink report on ferries is critical of the economics of such a project. The operating cost of a 100-passenger boat is four times that of a standard transit bus, but the passenger carrying capacity of four buses is 80 per cent higher than a ferry.

The cost of one such ferry is about double the cost of four buses, with the cost of operating ferry service to “require several millions of dollars to be spent on upgrading terminals.”

The resurfacing of another SeaBus was a surprise to West Vancouver Mayor Ron Wood.

“I’m encouraged but I thought they pretty well walked away from it,” said Wood. “I would like to see it, even on a seasonal basis.”

He’s not the only one in favour of expanding marine transit.

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie said TransLink staff were directed to take a closer look at the plan.

“The economics were a little stretched in the situation, but it makes a lot of sense,” said Brodie, pointing to the example of Sydney, Australia, where the harbour is used effectively by marine transit.

“In Richmond, we want to be using that same concept to have a similar pilot project to go from Richmond to Delta and back.”

A seasonal ferry between Ladner and Steveston, for instance, would be popular.

Maple Ridge and Langley will lose the Albion ferry when TransLink opens the Golden Ears toll bridge, but Maple Ridge Mayor Kathy Morse still thinks a ferry would be useful because of the future opening of a West Coast Express station at the Albion landing.

Ferries would also provide a margin of safety in the event of a disaster such as an earthquake, which would shut down bridges.

“There needs to be some thought given to how we’re going to get around under emergency conditions,” said Morse.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

‘You won’t recognize it in a year’s time,’ says Mayor Doug McCallum

Michael McCullough
Sun

Evidence is mounting that Surrey‘s long-sought vision for a dense, mixed-use downtown in the Whalley neighbourhood is finally taking shape.

“Two years . . . ago, we had zero development permits for this area. Today, as we stand here, we have 26 development permits, which means 26 projects that are going ahead,” said Mayor Doug McCallum, appearing Monday at the opening of Korean developer Jung Ventures’ sales centre for the five-tower Central City residential project alongside the King George SkyTrain station.

Moreover, the list of green-lit building projects shows a healthy balance between residential, retail and office development, McCallum said in an interview.

“You won’t recognize it in a year’s time,” he said, gesturing toward the still mostly low-rise, low-rent landscape surrounding the seven-acre Central City site.

The obvious exception is the 20-storey Central City office tower a few blocks away. Regarded as an NDP-era white elephant just a few years ago, the architecturally striking complex adjoining the old Surrey Place shopping mall is now more than 90 per-cent leased after 212,400 square feet of space was snapped up in the first quarter of this year.

Jung and marketing partner MAC Real Estate Solutions, meanwhile, will begin selling suites in “Infinity,” the first of a planned five residential towers with a “VIP” opening this Saturday. About 850 prospective buyers have registered to tour and possibly bid on 345 condominiums in the 36-storey structure, said MAC’s Jason Craik, and that doesn’t include real estate agents who will also attend the VIP launch.

“We haven’t seen a demand like this since three years ago. In fact I don’t think we’ve had a demand [like this] on any of the projects we’ve seen. For Surrey, it’s unprecedented,” said Craik, who is Greater Vancouver’s top realtor so far this year with 387 units worth $62 million sold.

Although the project has a number of selling points (unobstructed views, SkyTrain access, its own shopping arcade), Craik said the interest is clearly driven by the price. One-bedroom suites start at $140,000 and two-bedrooms at $180,000, compared with $218,000 and $260,000 for comparable units MAC is selling for another developer in Burnaby.

Rather than encourage the kind of lineups seen at other developments, the sales will be by appointment, 30 buyers at a time, he said. The sales centre will open to the general public two weeks later.

Construction is set to begin this June with completion two years later, said Jung Ventures president and CEO Miyung-Soo Jung. Depending on how quickly the first building sells out, the second and third could be put on the market as early as August or September, he said.

Jung said he needs to pre-sell 40 to 50 per cent of each building before starting construction.

In addition to Infinity, there are currently three condo towers breaking ground soon to the northwest near 104th Avenue, the RCMP is moving its regional headquarters to a site a few blocks to the east, and the city itself is developing the urban-style Holland Park across King George Highway to the west, McCallum said.

“There’s a really positive mood around here,” echoed Central City leasing manager Jeff Burton.

“This particular project was an anomaly,” Burton said of Central City, which was part of the former NDP government’s plan for a new technical university and ICBC headquarters, later abandoned. But the combination of Surrey‘s population growth, retail synergies with Surrey Place and SkyTrain access ultimately worked in Central City’s favour, Burton said.

“Where it was located ended up being a positive.”

[email protected]

AGENT OF CHANGE?:

The Central City residential development is being called the lynchpin of Surrey‘s downtown revitalization.

Developer: Jung Ventures Ltd.

Cost: $350 million

Project:

– 5 residential towers, each more than 30 storeys

– 1,400 units total

– 150,000-square-foot retail mall

Timeline: 2005-2010

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Well-priced real estate in family-oriented neighbourhoods needed

Wendy McLellan
Province

He’s a grinning grey mouse and your kids may soon know his name as well as that other mouse with the white gloves and short pants.

Chuck E. Cheese has already ramped up its Canadian TV-advertising campaign and is actively seeking Lower Mainland locations for new, kid-focused restaurants.

“Chuck E. Cheese is quite bullish on Canada,” said Chris Chan, an associate with the Vancouver office of Northwest Atlantic real-estate brokers. The company is looking for locations for the Texas-based CEC Entertainment Inc., which operates the restaurants.

“They want to roll out in the B.C. market almost as quickly as they can. They’re looking at sites, but nothing is close to done yet.”

B.C. currently has only one Chuck E. Cheese, which opened in Sept. 2003 in Langley. (A Coquitlam outlet closed 10 years ago.) The part-restaurant, part-entertainment centre, is geared to kids aged two to 12 with games, shows, pizza and lots of noise. Birthday parties are especially big at Chuck E. Cheese.

The challenge is finding well-priced real estate in the right family-oriented neighbourhood. The firm needs 12,000 square feet, plus lots of wide-stall parking for minivans. “The company is looking at four or five stores in Greater Vancouver over the next few years,” Chan said.

“But they have specific requirements. We may have to look at shopping centre locations where they can share parking.”

B.C. kids may not see the purple-trimmed restaurants often but they are likely becoming familiar with the little grey mouse. “Chuck E. Cheese is the most popular mouse in America and we want to do the same in Canada,” said Ken Bullock, vice-president of real estate for CEC Entertainment.

“In the U.S., we’re the second-largest advertiser next to McDonald’s.” The company is running frequent commercials on YTV and Teletoon — about four per hour.

Since the average child watches two hours of TV a day, “Chuck E. Cheese is front and centre in children’s minds,” Bullock said.

John Rice, CEC vice-president of marketing, said the firm has eight restaurants in Canada — five in Toronto, one each in Edmonton, Windsor, Ont., and Langley — and would like to open as many as 30 in the next five years. The rest of the 500 restaurants are in the U.S. where only 50 are franchised.

“We’ve identified quite a few potential areas in Canada,” Rice said. “The demographics in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto support us — the trick is finding locations.” He said Toronto and Edmonton will have new Chuck E. Cheese restaurants this year and a second location should be open in the Lower Mainland by next year.

© The Vancouver Province 2005

Golf course, college and housing proposed for the 113-hectare site; project could collide with the official plan

Michael McCullough
Sun

A little-known group of offshore investors has acquired the last large chunk of undeveloped private land in Whistler, with ambitious hopes of building an international college, multi-family housing and a golf course.

But the project appears to be on a collision course with Whistler’s official community plan, and could become a test of the resort’s commitment to controlling growth.

In a deal that closed this month, Chateau Nova Whistler Development Ltd. bought 113 hectares at the northwest end of Green Lake, on the resort municipality’s northern boundary about a 10-minute drive from Whistler Village. The site of an old sawmill, the forested property was held for a number of years by B.C.-based owners and was on the market for about a year at a list price of $12.9 million, said listing agent and former mayor Drew Meredith of Whistler Real Estate Ltd.

The sale price was not disclosed, but Meredith said it was less than the asking price.

Chateau Nova’s president and lead investor is Parvin Saadati, an Iranian-born resident of Dubai who also owns a condominium at the University of B.C.

According to Vancouver immigration consultant Reza Farkoush, who represents the new owners, Saadati has lined up investors from Dubai, India and China to participate in the project.

Farkoush said Chateau Nova would most likely work in conjunction with one or more Canadian developers to build and market the project, ideally before 2010. The components would include low-rise condominiums or townhouses, a private international college and possibly a golf course, which would take up close to half the property. Whether or not the golf course was included, the new community would feature ample green space, he said.

The group has scheduled a presentation for prospective buyers, development partners and investors in The Lakelands at Green Lake, as the project is called, at the Chateau Whistler on May 5.

But the project faces obstacles, most notably the cap on the number of beds in Whistler contained within the official community plan. Whistler is currently just 6,200 beds short of its 55,087-bed limit, and virtually all that new housing is spoken for.

“In most cases it’s already zoned,” said Bob MacPherson, the municipality’s general manager of planning and development.

Originally designed to keep Whistler to a size where it would not require an expensive sewage treatment facility to comply with provincial environmental laws, the bed cap today is more about the community’s perceived carrying capacity, MacPherson said.

“At what point does the resort experience disappear?” MacPherson asked rhetorically.

Since the cap was established in 1993, only one exception was made to a developer’s bed unit quota. In 1999 ski hill owner Intrawest Corp. was given 476 beds over the cap in a three-party deal that allowed a swath of formerly developable wetland to be preserved for conservation purposes. The deal enabled the construction of a Four Seasons resort hotel.

MacPherson said he had no knowledge of the Lakelands proposal, but by its very location it would also conflict with “Whistler 2020,” the community’s comprehensive sustainability plan adopted last year. That document confines future development to the corridor along Highway 99 between Function Junction in the south and Emerald Estates in the north. (The latter is at the south end of Green Lake.)

“Right now we have very limited zoning,” Farkoush said, essentially for single-family houses on large lots.

“There will be challenges,” he conceded. “We want to focus on the solutions.”

Whistler’s real estate market has been a queer anomaly in B.C. for the past 18 months. After a frenzy of speculative buying and unheard-of prices in the lead up to the awarding of the 2010 Olympics to Vancouver and Whistler in mid-2003, sales activity foundered and prices dropped off.

In January the B.C. Assessment Authority reported that Whistler was the only major community in the province where average home values declined. A two-bedroom apartment in Whistler village slipped in assessed value to $660,000 from $666,000 between July 2003 and July 2004, the provincial government agency said. The assessment on a single-family home in the Alpine Meadows neighbourhood similarly dropped, to an average $1.023 million from $1.056 million a year earlier.

Meredith believes it was a simple correction in a market that had become over-valued, rather than any fallout from the 2010 decision or the arrival at the building cap.

“In 2003 we had just a wild market,” he said. “We saw 30-per-cent growth in the real estate market in one year. Now we’re paying for that.”

Sales seem to be picking up this spring, Meredith said. It might have happened earlier if not for the disappointing ski season.

“Everybody still wants Whistler,” he observed. “There’s still development going on even though we’re at or near the cap.”

Developers such as the proponents of the Nita Lake Lodge — twice blocked by neighbours‘ objections and revived — are finding ways to build their projects through trades of amenities for zoning, for example.

Meredith, who met with Saadati in the course of the transaction, described her as a “worldly entrepreneur” looking for a glamourous investment play. In land title documents her occupation is listed as a dentist.

THE LIMITS OF GROWTH

Whistler caps its number of bed units to preserve its character.

Bed cap: 55,087

Existing bed units: 48,800

To be developed: 6,200

Employee housing allowed in excess of cap: 6,650

Source: Resort Municipality of Whistler

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

 

Michael Kane
Sun

Office vacancy rates are falling in the Lower Mainland thanks to higher demand fuelled by the province’s robust economy, according to the Business Council of British Columbia.

The result is more balanced conditions in what has been a tenants’ market for several years.

“We have been waiting for a long time and things are finally starting to turn,” said Avtar Bains, senior vice-president with Colliers International.

“It is a balanced market where the negotiations between landlord and tenant are on a level playing field and where no one has the upper hand to any great extent.”

But the report, published in the council’s latest newsletter, cautions the balance could shift in favour of landlords in the run-up to the 2010 Olympics.

Wendy Waters, the report’s author and research director for Avison Young Commercial Real Estate, predicts Greater Vancouver office vacancy rates will fall to 12.1 per cent this year, 9.5 per cent in 2006, 7.5 per cent in 2007 and six per cent in 2008.

The office market is even tighter in downtown Vancouver where vacancy rates are forecast to fall to 10.3 per cent this year and seven per cent in 2006.

Waters notes:

– In 2004, office vacancy rates in Greater Vancouver dropped from 15.7 per cent to 12.1 per cent with a net absorption of more than 1.4 million square feet — enough room to accommodate 7,000 new office workers.

– In downtown Vancouver, the vacancy rate fell from 13.5 per cent to 10.3 per cent with net absorption of 700,000 square feet — room for 3,500 office workers.

– Demand for office space is being driven by B.C.’s rebounding resource industries, continued growth of the region’s technology and other knowledge-based industries, the expansion of global trade and Greater Vancouver’s gateway role.

– Office vacancy rates in Greater Vancouver are projected to continue declining, creating tighter over-all conditions, as the region’s economy gains momentum and spending associated with the 2010 Olympics takes place.

Waters suggests businesses with expiring leases, or looking to expand between now and early 2010, consider negotiating early renewal or future expansion rights sometime this year.

“Assuming that the economy continues to do well, as widely expected, vacancy rates will almost certainly decline, further restricting location options and driving lease rates higher,” she says. “And as 2010 approaches, increased demand from Olympic-related users will further reduce space options for local business.”

Waters notes the industrial real estate market is also strong with Greater Vancouver showing the lowest industrial vacancy rate in North America.

She says key changes reshaping the region’s industrial real estate market include the trend to build larger warehouse-distribution facilities, a shifting of the industrial real estate base to the eastern parts of the Lower Mainland, encroachment of other uses on urban industrial space, and rapid growth in global container traffic.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Michael Kane
Sun

Federal statistics suggesting new home prices are topping out in Greater Vancouver were dismissed Tuesday by local market watchers.

Numbers from Statistics Canada show the prices of single detached, attached and row houses up just 3.6 per cent over the 12 months to February, 2005. That’s less than half the 7.7-per-cent growth in prices recorded for new homes in Victoria, and behind the pace set by every other major market in Canada.

Further, new home prices in the Vancouver area have risen just 2.8 per cent in Vancouver since 1997, according to StatsCan’s new housing price index released Tuesday.

In fact, the price of a standard home, both new and old, has risen about 70 per cent over the past eight years, according to realtors Royal LePage.

Industry experts say the StatsCan numbers are skewed because they exclude condominiums and focus on new home construction on greenfield sites in the outer suburbs.

“Their index is horribly off for Vancouver as a general rule,” said Tsur Somerville, director of the Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate at the University of B.C.‘s Sauder School of Business. “They look at the price of a new home but don’t control for where the new home is built. Most new homes are built in the valley and over the last 10 years they have been built further and further out in the valley.”

In the Greater Vancouver metropolitan area, the median new home price rose 10 per cent from $455,000 to $500,000 in the 12 months to February, said Cameron Muir, senior market analyst with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. The median is the mid-range point of all sales.

Over the same period, the average price rose 18 per cent from $496,421 to $588,000.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Industry welcomes resurgence in non-residential projects

Michael McCullough
Sun

Non-residential building construction is taking off in Greater Vancouver after a long lull.

The city experienced the biggest increase in non-residential building construction of any major city in Canada during the first quarter, Statistics Canada reported Monday. Investment in commercial, industrial and institutional buildings rose by $29 million, or 7.5 per cent, to $409 million in the January-March period compared to the last quarter of 2004.

Around B.C., non-residential investment climbed a more modest 1.6 per cent to $711 million in the first quarter, dragged down in part by a 33-per-cent drop (to $44 million) in Victoria, StatsCan said.

Institutional construction was the largest contributor to the growth, both in Vancouver and the province in general, at a time when other provinces were cutting back their public projects.

“British Columbia stood out with the strongest investment growth (up 5.2 per cent to $186 million) in the first quarter as a result of investment in health-care facilities,” the agency said. In Greater Vancouver, institutional investment was up 12.8 per cent to $97 million.

But the strong showing may be at least partly due to timing.

“We’re coming off a trough,” said B.C. Central Credit Union economist David Hobden, whereas “the rest of Canada is coming off a high period. It makes Vancouver look good.”

Nonetheless, Hobden thinks this is just the start of a longer-term upswing.

“We are forecasting continued growth in non-residential investment through 2009,” he said. He attributes very little of the construction activity to the 2010 Olympics, but rather to the business cycle.

In its weekly economic briefing, the credit union noted the increase in non-residential building permits over the past 12 months, much of it coming from industrial plants, recreation, warehouse and office buildings and government-built social housing. Hotel, restaurant and school construction, by contrast, was down.

“While the actual value of non-residential building permits is normally volatile from month to month, the trend has been rising for all three major classes of structures [commercial, industrial and institutional] since mid-2004,” the briefing said.

“We’re forecasting a 15-per-cent gain this year, led by capital spending on government buildings,” Hobden added in an interview.

Vancouver Regional Construction Association president Keith Sashaw said the turnaround became noticeable midway through 2004, long after the turning point in housing construction.

“What we are seeing is a very strong resurgence,” he said, after a slow period for both residential and non-residential building between 1994 and 2000.

Sashaw rattled off a list of major projects including the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre expansion, construction at the University of B.C., airport expansion, and an ambulatory care project at Vancouver General Hospital.

[email protected]

THE OTHER BUILDING BOOM:

Home construction has been barrelling along in B.C. but now non-residential building is on a solid upward trend as well.

$177 million: Value of non-residential building permits in B.C. in February

$166 million: Value of non-residential building permits in B.C. in January

Increase: +$11 million

Source: Credit Union Central B.C.

While investment in non-residential construction was up in 17 of 28 metropolitan areas in the first quarter, Vancouver showed the largest increase.

Investment in non-residential construction, Q4 2004-Q1 2005

Vancouver:

+$29 million

Edmonton:

+$21 million

Calgary:

+$18 million

Winnipeg:

+$6 million

Toronto:

+$12 million

Montreal:

+$19 million

Halifax:

+$2 million

Source: Statistics Canada

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Erickson-designed building threatened with demolition

Frances Bula
Sun

VANCOUVER – Heritage advocates say they plan to keep fighting to save the Arthur Erickson-designed Evergreen building in the next eight months.

“As long as the building’s standing, we’re going to see if there’s a way we can save it,” says heritage commissioner Cheryl Cooper.

She said the commission has received a flood of calls and

e-mails in support of their efforts to lobby both owner John Laxton and the city to find a solution to save the building, a unique terraced structure with greenery cascading down the side, in the 1200 block of West Pender near Coal Harbour.

The building, a precursor to his law-courts design, would be the first of Erickson’s buildings ever to be torn down.

But the project manager for the company that owns it says it’s almost impossible for the owner and the city to come up with a compromise that would allow it to stand.

“It’s highly inconceivable,” said Andrew Wade, of Laxton’s Cathedral Development Group. Wade said that the building has only about eight months of guaranteed life left.

However, Wade hopes that some of the decisions city council made last Thursday in a vain attempt to salvage the Evergreen building will help other threatened landmark buildings in the future.

Councillors voted unanimously to ask that staff work with Laxton to look at any way of retaining the building. They also asked that the city’s heritage register be upgraded and that there be a heritage representative added to the advisory panel of the city’s development permit board.

“If we had had that support at that time, the project probably would have gone through,” said Wade. The company is now looking at designing a new building. So far, Erickson has said he doesn’t want to be involved in the destruction of one of his own buildings.

The city’s development permit board, in a 2-1 vote, turned down a proposal from Laxton last fall that he be permitted to add four storeys to the building while converting it from office to residential space. The proposal had been supported by the city’s urban-design panel and its planning department. Laxton was so confident of approval that he had already emptied the building of most of its occupants and had arranged a presentation-centre launch.

But urban-design panel representative Bruce Haden argued against the addition at the permit-board hearing, and the then-head of engineering, Dave Rudberg, and deputy city manager Brent McGregor voted against central-area planning director Larry Beasley on the design change, saying the extra four storeys detracted from an iconic building.

Although the building is considered a landmark, it was not designated as a heritage building because the register has not been updated recently. Heritage designation would have given both the city and the owner extra negotiating room.

At last week’s meeting, Laxton and his project team said they had discovered several additional problems since they made their original application that make renovating the building economically impossible, even if the city is willing to give it a heritage bonus.

Wade said the building leaks, all the floors have “suffered severe deflections,” which means it would need upgrading to make it earthquake-proof, and there isn’t any way to build or buy enough parking in the area, which is a problem when selling high-end residential units.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005