Fresh off the UBC beat, I seem to have gotten embroiled in a few real-estate stories the last few days.
The talk of the town the last few months (well, really, since the Cambie corridor exploded from single family to multi-family, but even more so now) has been the intense competition for multi-family sites around town. I heard about it when I was working on the story I did about land assembly a few months ago. Brokers and developers in Surrey and Vancouver were talking about a new wave of investors. Then an architect mentioned the land assembly going on in North Vancouver, being done by some very young new offshore investors who were buying up homes around lower Lonsdale.
My stories this week explored some of that. Colliers came out with a report today about the jump in sales values of multi-family sites.
I also went looking for one of the “offshore” buyers being talked about. It turned out he was not quite as offshore as I’d imagined. Yes, Kevin Cheung is getting his equity stake from his dad’s development business in Shanghai. But he lives here, went to Churchill and UBC, and he and his wife just had a baby at St. Paul’s last week. So … a kind of new Vancouverite, with a foot each in two worlds. The story here.
I’m sure you all have a lot of thoughts about this. If we could keep it civil and factual, much appreciated.