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City gets its first money — $57 million — since taking over village

May 19th, 2011 · 6 Comments

That’s the main news I saw from the latest receiver’s report issued yesterday. The news about the sales we’ve heard before. Apparently some new numbers will be out at Bob Rennie’s speech to the UDI today.

Other fun highlights I noticed:

– All of the subsidized units of social housing have been rented out

– 148 of 252 of the city units have been rented out in total

– The receiver has now received $1.3 million in fees, though the report stresses that a lot of that money is the result of having to deal with the deficiencies issues

– 33 more units have been released for sale from the block of condos that the receiver originally thought about renting out. But the sales of anything below $500,000 has been going really well, so more units in that price range have been released. More evidence that if developers had built something more modestly scaled, they might have sold the units faster. Sounds like the $1 million places still moving slowly.

– Almost 2,000 deficiencies were reported AFTER the receiver took over, compared to about 250 before

– A really fun read is the correspondence from a disgruntled resident in one of the appendices, with repeated threats to go to the media and ruin their sales launch. Too bad the name is blacked out.

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  • Brenton

    It will be interesting to see how Max et al react to this. Just yesterday he was saying how unbelievable it was that the social housing units were sitting empty.

  • Max

    @ Frances Bula:

    The link to the report is not operating…..:)

  • Joseph Jones

    How about the number of units that are sold and not lived in?

    The progressive hollowing-out of our ghost city of “villages” remains such a conveniently elusive story.

    Bring on the data!

  • Max

    @ Joseph Jones #3

    This is taken from the Vancouver Sun article on the same topic:

    As of Monday, 124 strata units have been sold at a value of more than $84 million, with most of the sales expected to close by the end of this month, the report said.

    Sales have far exceeded the receiver’s expectation, resulting in 33 additional units at the Compass building being released for sale 10 days ago, the receiver said.

    It also says the 119 units in the three market rental buildings are now completely leased and 22 of the units in the Bridge building were leased within three weeks of being offered.

    Occupancy now is at 98 per cent of the original estimate to be achieved by July 31, the report said.

    Another 263 condo units were sold before the receiver was appointed last November.

    and

    The city earlier said it expects lose $40-50 million on the project, which will be partly offset by the city’s $3.5 billion real estate holdings, the Property Endowment Fund.

    In March, when sales of condos were relaunched, Rennie Marketing Systems, the receiver’s sales agent, sold 118 of 737 remaining units, nearly double its original sales estimate.

    Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Sales+former+Vancouver+Olympic+Village+exceed+original+estimates+report+says/4805403/story.html#ixzz1MpRAq2Xa

  • Bill McCreery

    There is certainly more than $40 to $50 million adrift on the OV under the VV watch.

    I suggest to you there is also considerably more than the $230 million loss which has heretofore been suggested.

    It is worth considering that the assumed total loss of $230m has been arrived at by accepting Vision’s and Mayor Greggs claim Vision Vancouver is only going to lose $50m, and then adding the $178m lost revenue from the land sale. I don’t think so.

  • Max

    @ Bill:

    Oh, I realize that Bill, sadly others, including Ballam, don’t get it. Perhaps it was my 7+ years in the banking industry that helps…

    The City should not have spent that money before it was in hand – which means it sits on the books as a negative number.

    This has me curious as it is contrary to a May 5 report: (re Michael Geller’s blog)

    All of the subsidized units of social housing have been rented out

    – 148 of 252 of the city units have been rented out in total
    ****
    It makes me wonder if it is the subsidized (911 responders and teachers) units that are now fully rented (they did have about 200 applicants) while the other social housing, the low income housing, is still not filled. There are still 104 units not filled of the 252 social housing units that were made available.

    Money down the drain, evey month.