Financing details vague, but project would include Canada’s largest water park, hotels and a convention centre

Brian Morton
Sun

Recession? What recession?

That’s the word from Kamloops builder Doug Wittal and his partners, who are ignoring the economic downturn and moving ahead with a $200-million theme park that could well be the city’s largest tourism project yet.

“We’ve never participated in this recession,” Wittal, owner of Kamloops-based DW Builders, said in an interview Friday. “We’re not involved in it. We hope to start construction on the water park in about three months. We hope to have it open in the summer of 2010.”

Called Sedric’s Adventure Resort and Theme Park, the project — located on an18-hectare stretch of land on the Kamloops Indian reserve beside Highway 5 — is huge by any standard.

Wittal said it will not only include Canada’s largest water park, capable of handling up to 8,000 people a day, but two hotels, a 3,000-seat ice arena with a retractable roof (for use in the summer, including concerts), two drive-through restaurants, a commercial office and retail building, and an 800-person convention centre, which is expected to have an $80-million annual impact on the local economy.

The water park itself will include what Wittal said are some first-ever rides, including a 360-degree loop, as well as a wave pool, a swim-up bar, a “lazy river” for floating in tubes and a “flow-rider” surfing pool.

Wittal, who is partnering with Kamloops-based Touch Point Attractions, said he has investors lined up from China, Japan and Switzerland, but wouldn’t provide any more details. “The project is so large that we have different avenues of financing for each part.”

Wittal said he has faith in Kamloops‘ future, citing the airport expansion and the “10-million tire traffickers that go through Kamloops a year.”

As well, WestJet began direct flights from Calgary to Kamloops last June, opening up service from Alberta.

Asked if it was Kamloops‘ largest tourism project ever, he replied: “That’s a fair assessment.”

Wittal said the project will ultimately employ about 1,500 people and that it should be completed in about five years.

Wittal — whose biggest project so far is a 52-unit townhouse development — said he’s confident the project will work out fine. “This is something totally different, although it’s not significantly different than what we [build]. And it’s something that’s needed in Kamloops.”

The larger 300-room hotel is being designed by award-winning Vancouver architect Nick Milkovich, who said this week that he has studied the property and its environment.

“I was taken by the colouring,” he said of the sage, trees and land.

Kamloops Indian Band Chief Shane Gottfriedson welcomed the jobs and the boost to the region’s economy that the project would bring.

“Our future’s very bright,” he said. “We are very excited about the opportunities.”

Mayor Peter Milobar said the people behind Sedric’s are leaders in their fields. “They know what they’re doing.”

Geoff Chutter of Whitewater West is doing the water park. He has designed parks for Disney, Universal Studios, Six Flags, SeaWorld and others.

“SeaWorld and Knott’s Berry Farm have nothing on this project. I know. I designed them,” he said.

Despite Wittal’s optimism, the senior vice-president of marketing for Wild Water Kingdom in Brampton, Ont., wasn’t sure Kamloops has enough people to buoy up Sedric’s.

David Bray said Wild Water Kingdom, which is the biggest water park in Canada, has several million people in the Toronto area to draw upon. Even at that, the park gets about 5,000 people on a good day — 3,000 less than Wittal’s hoping for.

Bray said tourism travel is down because of the economy.

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Damian Inwood
Province

A staff recommendation for a new bylaw, which restricts the way people can rent out two or more rooms to Olympic spectators, got unanimous approval from the city’s standing committee on services and budgets yesterday. Photograph by: Les Bazso, The Province

Vancouver residents seeking “windfall profits” from legally renting out their homes during the 2010 Olympics will need to cough up $106 for a business licence.

And after June 1, no one will be able to take part if they evict their tenants with a view to cashing in on Olympic gold.

But Olympic housing activist Am Johal dubbed the new bylaw as “inadequate” and said it would do little to stop greedy landlords from kicking out long-term tenants in favour of well-heeled tourists.

“It’s like pitching a tent in the middle of a tornado,” Johal jeered. “It’s a nice gesture, but it’s highly ineffective.”

A staff recommendation for a new bylaw, which restricts the way people can rent out two or more rooms to Olympic spectators, got unanimous approval from the city’s standing committee on services and budgets yesterday.

The committee heard from seven speakers, both for and against the bylaw, which allows fines of up to $2,000 for offenders.

The committee added more teeth to city planning recommendations, moving up the date that rooms must be tenant-free to June 1 from Sept. 1.

While Johal, spokesman for the Impact on Communities Coalition, was happy with that change, he predicted there will still be 1,000 evictions in the city directly related to Olympic renters.

He said offending property owners could still make thousands of dollars, even after paying the fines.

Johal predicted that landlords will get around the bylaw by evicting tenants by June 1, leasing their properties for six months and then cashing in on big bucks during January and February.

He said councillors had “reinforced the idea that tenants are second-class citizens in the city.”

City planner Celine Mauboles said a quick search of Craigslist shows that homes are being offered from a couple of hundred dollars a night to $20,000 for an entire East Vancouver house for the whole of February.

Mauboles‘ report predicted that up to 1,000 people would pay for a licence to rent their homes.

Tourism Vancouver‘s 2010 expert, Walt Judas, welcomed the bylaw and said that Olympic ticket-holders are already calling and complaining they can’t find anywhere to stay.

“What we want to avoid are two headlines that will negatively affect our reputation, no matter how good the actual competition and Games are,” he said. “These headlines are ‘No Vacancy’ and, ‘Gouging.'”

He said people don’t want to be staying in Chilliwack and travelling to watch speed skating at the Richmond Oval.

The recommendation calls for the B.C. government to amend the Vancouver Charter to allow for $10,000 fines to homeowners who break the rental bylaw.

But, due to the provincial election, councillors were told, there’s unlikely to be a legislative session until later in the fall.

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Derrick Penner
Sun

Housing prices continued to decline in the first quarter of 2009 in areas of Metro Vancouver, though some sectors saw stabilization, according to the realty firm Royal LePage’s quarterly house-price survey released Wednesday.

Canvassing Vancouver, West Vancouver and North Vancouver, Royal LePage found that average prices were down 12 per cent over the first three months of 2009 compared with the same period of 2008.

West Vancouver saw prices dip 16.3 per cent across all types. The average price for a standard two-storey house, at $930,000, saw the steepest decline at, 17 per cent, from a year ago.

The average price for a standard two-storey house in North Vancouver, at $660,000, while down 14.3 per cent from a year ago, remained unchanged from the fourth quarter of 2008.

“All of a sudden prices have rolled back a couple of years,” Bill Binnie, president of Royal LePage Northshore said in an interview. “Interest rates are better than they’ve ever been,” which is attracting buyers.

He said the market is strongest in what he termed the first-time buyer range. Recent sales activity, which has climbed from last fall’s extreme lows, has given the market some parameters around what people are willing to pay, he said. “It has frozen prices, at this point, which is a very positive thing for buyers and sellers. We can absolutely define the market.”

However, sales volumes “are still nowhere near, nor will they be [in the near future] near what we saw in the frenzied market of 2001 to last summer.”

Robyn Adamache, senior analyst for Metro Vancouver at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., added that overall Metro Vancouver sales in March were still well below sales levels for the same month in 2008 and 2006. Lower sales, coupled with high inventories of unsold homes in resale markets, and rising inventories of unsold new homes, will continue to put pressure on prices, she said.

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Scott Simpson
Sun

Vancouver‘s vaunted high-tech industrial zone is a bust.

“Modest” demand for high-tech zoning in the designated False Creek Flats area around Terminal Avenue and Great Northern Way has prompted city council to take the first step toward rezoning the area for a broader range of non-residential uses.

The 124-hectare area has been awaiting an influx of high-tech firms since the late 1990s, restricting the amount of general office and other uses in the hopes that proximity to downtown, transit, and a concentrated development zone would be sufficient to draw in companies in the information technology and biotech sectors.

However, in a report that was approved by council this week, city staff note that the expected influx never took place.

“Since that time the ‘high-tech’ sector has not grown as quickly as anticipated,” the report said. “It has been difficult for development to proceed due to an inability to secure a sufficient number of ‘high-tech’ tenants to meet the zoning requirement.

“At the same time, the demand for general office uses in the area has increased.”

The report notes that high-tech zoning limits the amount of conventional office space, and as a consequence, a number of development inquiries about the area quickly fizzled out.

As well, developers complain they cannot find enough high-tech tenants to make a project viable.

“The poor take-up of this zoning is due to the difficulty in securing ‘high-tech’ tenants to meet zoning requirements, and the unwillingness of developers to build speculatively given the inherent risk of the narrowly defined uses,” the report said.

Council accepted a recommendation to open up the area to requests for additional zoning — including general office use, child care services, restaurants to serve the local area, and “other relevant services.”

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Fall in new construction follows drop in home sales

Derrick Penner
Sun

Housing starts across British Columbia remained depressed in the first quarter of 2009, falling almost 70 per cent from the same quarter of 2008, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported Wednesday.

While housing starts ticked up slightly in March on a national basis, builders in B.C. started work on 2,517 new homes in the first three months compared with 8,532 in 2008.

Locally, the declines in starts ranged from almost 93 per cent in Kelowna, where builders started on 72 new homes compared with 985 in the first quarter last year; to 31 per cent in Nanaimo, where builders started on 170 new homes versus 247 in the same months a year ago.

New housing construction slipped in March to a pace that would see builders across urban B.C. start work on 10,000 units in 2009, compared with a pace of 12,000 units seen in February.

In the Lower Mainland, Metro Vancouver saw starts fall by two thirds, 1,829 units compared with 5,131 in the first quarter of 2008.

Robyn Adamache, senior analyst for Canada Mortgage and Housing in Vancouver, said the drop in starts now is a lagging response to the dramatic fall-off in sales that the Lower Mainland and other regions experienced through last summer and fall.

Comparing the current real-estate market correction to the past couple of market cycles, Adamache added that “it seems like builders have responded a little bit more quickly to the downturn in the resale market.”

Across Metro Vancouver, West Vancouver saw the steepest drop in the first quarter at 92 per cent, with the Tri-Cities and Surrey not far behind at 91 per cent.

Delta was the only municipality to see an increase in housing starts. Builders there started work on 81 new housing units, an increase of 55 per cent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

B.C., and Metro Vancouver in particular, did see a significant rise in the value of building-permit applications in February, which signals higher levels of building in future months.

Adamache added that current housing starts are well below her forecast for Metro Vancouver, so the permit numbers are evidence backing her expectation for “things to start improving a bit by the end of the year.”

Peter Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association, said record attendance of almost 900 participants at his organization’s seminar for first-time homebuyers indicates to him that there is demand in the market that will support more housing starts later on this year.

“That [seminar], for me, was the litmus test of where we are,” Simpson said in an interview.

If the seminar had low attendance, coupled with low housing starts, “I’d say that’s going to be a long-term [situation],” Simpson added.

In the meantime, however, Simpson said the low level of starts does not bode well for employment in the construction sector.

Adamache said rising unemployment in B.C. is one factor that will weigh on housing in the months to come.

Douglas Porter, an economist with BMO Capital Markets said, “You are starting to see very real job losses in B.C. B.C. is, unfortunately starting to catch up with Ontario on that front.”

On the bright side, Porter said falling prices and lower interest rates have made homes more affordable, which will help mitigate the effects of higher unemployment.

Across Canada, home construction rose unexpectedly in March, led by Ontario and Quebec, CMHC said.

There were 154,700 housing starts on an annualized basis during the month, up from a revised 136,100 units in February, the government agency said. Many economists had expected housing starts to dip to 130,000 units in March.

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Some declines have hit 17 per cent, but Victoria is bucking the trend

Elaine O’Connor
Province

Vancouver‘s real-estate market continues to dive, with year-over-year price declines of as much as 17 per cent in some sectors, according to Royal LePage’s latest quarterly report.

Prices are depressed across the region, with the average price in Vancouver‘s west and east sides, North and West Vancouver down 12 per cent from this time last year, according to statistics in Royal LePage’s latest house-price survey.

The pain is being felt the hardest among the high-end properties in West Vancouver, where tony homes are no longer fetching top dollar.

Prices there are down an average of 16.3 per cent in one year.

Broken down into house categories, average West Vancouver two-storey houses fell 17 per cent to $930,000, bungalows were down 16.2 per cent to $880,000, and condos fell 15.8 per cent to $400,000.

Across Canada, prices are down, during the year’s first quarter. The average price of a two-storey home during 2009’s first three months was $379,636, down 6.5 per cent from a year earlier. The average condo price was down 3.4 per cent to $232,877.

Royal LePage North Shore president Bill Binnie says there’s an upside: the down market can offer opportunities for first-time and move-up buyers.

“The activity we’re seeing now is as a result of first-time buyers who have not been able to get into the market because of the high prices and lack of inventory. Now prices have rolled back two years and interest rates, we have never seen them at this rate before. So they are seeing this as an opportunity.” For move-up buyers, Binnie said, “the high-priced houses have come off a little more in price than the lower-priced ones, so if you are moving up the differential is smaller, and the financing cost is a lot less.” Across Vancouver, price declines were pronounced.

In North Vancouver, year-over-year house prices are down an average of 14.2 per cent, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Royal LePage points out the rate of decline has slowed somewhat in North Vancouver, with prices not falling as much this quarter as last.

North Vancouver two-storey homes lost 14.3 per cent to an average of $660,000, bungalows fell 14.8 per cent to $605,000 and condos dropped 13.4 per cent to $290,000 compared to this time last year.

In Vancouver West, two-storey houses have dropped 9.8 per cent over last year to $1.15 million, bungalows declined 9.5 per cent to $950,000 and condominiums are going for 7.4 per cent off for an average of $640,000 in 2009.

In Vancouver East, two-storey homes fell 8.7 per cent to $575,000, bungalows dropped 10.1 per cent to 540,000 and condos lost eight per cent and are selling for an average of $311,000 this quarter.

As prices fall, buyers can lose any sense of urgency, as they wait for them to fall further.

Royal LePage Westside real-estate specialist David Scarr says the last quarter of 2008 was among the worst he’s ever seen, with some home prices in Dunbar and Point Grey off 30 per cent.

“The last quarter was almost a write-off, probably the slowest I’ve seen in the last 24 years,” Scarr said, adding while the local market will remain sensitive to global economic factors, he’s optimistic the rest of 2009 won’t be as brutal.

Scarr says buyers “don’t have to compromise now. Now you can be a bit more patient,” but adds there’s been an uptick in entry-level sales activity in February and March, indicating more competition.

Scarr’s advice for sellers? “You’ve got to be realistic about your asking price. You have to look at what has sold. And you have to show your property in the absolute best light.” The bright spot for B.C. sellers at the moment is in Victoria, where some sale prices are up in the first quarter of 2009 compared to 2008.

Broken down by house type, Victoria two-storey house prices have dropped just 5.4 per cent to $435,000, bungalow prices have risen annually by 3.2 per cent to $453,000 and condo prices fell 11.6 per cent to 260,000.

The Royal LePage survey studies seven types of housing in 250 neighbourhoods in Canada.

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