I’m watching to see what good deals come forth for that Village on Kingsway, aka Norquay Village Neighbourhood Centre. We cover hundreds of acres and our 10,000 residents already pay lots of taxes! City planners have demonstrated to us that we are an amenity desert. Right now those projected thousands of additional future residents are headed to nowheresville.

B>Pruitt-Igoe luvie was blown up!

My family just sold a condo in a complex rife with for sale signs. We sold, and not to a Chinese speculator, almost immediately because we used common sense pricing rather than following the herd.

It was not in OV!

Vancouver, indeed the west coast, has for decades relied on hubris and false promises to keep the treadmill of delusional prosperity rolling despite very dicey economic underpinnings.

Dicey economics: selling real estate offshore, a betrayal of our kids birthright and a sure fire way to run the economy into the ground.

Paradise, views, world class, the usual boilerplate coming from the usual suspects is just simply not enough to build a prosperous foundation. As a ruse it is second only to Dr. Fruit Fly and his AGW hangers on.

The shibboleth of exponential growth is winding down. The real estate bubble has popped.

The Olympics were a big mistake. Furlong’s missal about breaking even expounds the usual corporate bubble-omics. What does he care? He got his bonus!

OV was the right development at the wrong time: victim of a world wide financial melt down just at it was coming on stream. We are not over the worst.

Despite the preceding rancorous posts Olympic village, or Village on False Creek, is a magnificent development.

I hope it sells out sooner than later. I hope it bulges with happy families, smelly socials and stinking rich socialites, dodging the cyclists, thumbing the Chickadees and dipping their toes in a cleaned up creek.

And who owns or is building the various tower complexes around the OV? Peter Wall made a lot of noise to differentiate his development.
Are the neighbours going to be helped by a semi-full “village”?

Ah, for the days of Ward 7 Secession in 1957 when a “village” could break away from a city.

Fabulous, just in time for the big relaunch of the Oly Village, the housing advocates will be setting up their tents, as promised.

Nice image for potential buyers.

@ Max 7

Isn’t the tent city due to start tomorrow February 11th..

@ George:

I thought I had read that it would go up tomorrow, but I see it is now the 26th.

While I agree with the recommended 30% discount, (especially since that is the number I proposed on CTV Wednesday evening) and deferring some sales of high end units till later, I am disturbed by the receiver’s recommendation to rent up to 127 units…

If all 127 units are rented, this triggers an upfront HST payment in the order of $10 million. It will also result in thousands of dollars in monthly losses, no property tax recoveries, and potential for significant downstream costs and losses.

As we all know, when you drive a car off the lot, the value goes down….the same holds true for high end condos that are rented out…

Yes, it creates some market rental, and could result in more body heat, but let’s not forget that to date only 87 of the 119 Millennium rental units were leased up, with some tenants paying under the $2.30 a foot the city hopes to get for these units.

(As an aside, the larger a unit, the lower the rent on a square foot basis…so a $800,000 two bedroom and den unit will require a $96,000 up front HST payment, followed by thousands in monthly subsidies.) Guess who’s paying those subsidies.

I can’t understand how this can be a fiscally prudent approach, especially since there are better alternatives. For example, the city could sell these units with creative financing packages that would defer a portion of the initial price to a later date with a ‘silent second mortgage”’. This approach is used extensively in other cities and countries, but it does not seem to have been even considered at all by the receiver. By putting certain conditions in place, these units could be differentiated from the other units being offered for sale.

In a similar vein, the receiver doesn’t seem to have considered my suggestion that the Millennium rental units be strata-titled so that they can eventually be sold off over time. This could help reduce our losses by tens of millions of dollars.

Now you know why I was so insistant that the social housing units be sold, and why I thought the City should have agreed last year to reduce prices when the program was launched in May 2010. Prices haven’t dropped 30% since May. As Bob Rennie has eloquently stated, the pricing was wrong in May….he knew it, most industry experts knew it….but sadly the City chose not to allow a reduction in prices during 2010. That was a costly mistake.

I know that many real estate experts share my concerns…I therefore hope the receiver and city administration will be willing to meet with us and explore further how best to minimize the losses which today I estimate to be at least $150 million.

@ Michael Geller #13

I agree with your analysis.

It seems they are leaving a lot of uneccesary monies on the table.

I think if Rennie were to offer some sort of financial packaging, it would open up opportunities to get these sold.

And I fully agree that once these units are rented, they will be a harder sell down the line – unless the City plans on being a landlord for life.

At Roger Kemble #14

Unless you have a constructive idea to bring forward perhpas you would like to rethink the uncessary name calling – it is childish.

Never, were these units going to be used for ‘street homeless’ or the ‘hard to house’ which includes the addicts etc. Regarldess of what theatrical rant Raymond Louie puts forward.

They were to be used for low income, social housing. There is a difference.

Because of what Robertson and Vision has done in the negative messaging they put out surrounding the village, we taxpayers are on the hook big time. They wanted political points and maybe the got them – at the time. But now fingers are pointing in their direction and what they did hurt this project, those points will dissappear.

Now, it is trying to figure out how to best salvage this mess and recover the tax dollars they so willingly sacraficed.

This just up;

Gregor not totally on board
VANCOUVER/CKNW(AM980)
Mike Bothwell
2/11/2011

Mayor Gregor Robertson is insisting Vancouver property taxes won’t be affected by the financially troubled Olympic Village. But he doesn’t sound convinced a new sales plan will help get all taxpayers money back.

The Mayor says condo sales haven’t been happening at the Village for a few months. So a new plan to sell 230 of the units for as much as 30 percent off is an attempt to create some momentum.

As for eventually making back all the 750 million dollars the city is owed, “It’s too early to say whether we’ll get back all of that investment to taxpayers.” The City’s property base doesn’t take a big hit. It will not affect property taxes and the day to day running of the City.”

Robertson says it’ll take several years to sell all the units that are still available
but the City can be patient.

Let’s call it “The False Village Up The Creek”

Max @ 15

Unless you have a constructive idea to bring forward perhpas(sic) you would like to rethink the uncessary(sic) name calling – it is childish.

May I suggest, sir, before you continue your school marm poseur you learn to spell and type!

The most constructive idea, sir, yet proffered in this conversation is to caution Michael against promoting creative financing packages which have had, and are having, devastating results on world mortgages and housing. Have you not noticed? Are you asleep?

RE-THINK! CONSTRUCTIVE! CHILDISH! INDEED!

Please re-read . . . I qualified my . . . errrr . . . “name calling” with the term “familiar colloquialism” deflecting the names from my authorship but which, if I may say so, describes you, having missed the subtly, as not only wantonly churlish, petulant but childish too!

Perhaps your vocabulary is more limited than mine in which case I forgive.

Michael in his certitude, if I may borrow from Thomas Wolfe, is the sort of . . . logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Not safe to be so wrapped up in such personal certitude in these shifting times . . . take care . . .

@Bill

You write as if Michael had actually made a proposal of some substance, rather than falling back on the magic of (completely unspecified) “creative financing”.

Perhaps if there were a more detailed proposal we would be able to accurately compare it’s costs with the proposal from Ernst & Young.

Bill @22

Well, . . . have you any better ideas? if you are referring to creative financing packages as better ideas then I suggest you remember the familiar addage “Insanity is defined as repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result” Need I elaborate?

As for . . .

Hey Sugg @24

…this high heeled wearing ‘Max’ Max Sugg whatever she/he/it calls she/he/itself Michael Geller is hitting the nail on the head.

You got that right just like the hammer he is and you are the wooden head he is hammering it into . . . QED

While some people have suggested to me that renting the units may not be as costly or inappropriate as I fear….here are a few ideas that might be explored as an alternative to renting units:

1. Units could be sold with a Vendor Take-back mortgage from the city. Interest would accrue, but need not be paid until the earlier of a predetermined date, say five or ten years from now, or when the unit is sold.

To illustrate the point, a $750,000 unit sells for $650,000 and the city holds a $100,000 mortgage. The advantage of this approach is that the number of potential buyers increases. The disadvanatages are deferred cash return to the city, and some risks to the city if the units do not increase in value.

Given that this is an emerging community, I think the risk of lower values in the future is less here than in other market areas, especially if the units are fairly priced to begin with.

2. A sale at 5 or 10 per cent below market to a preferred market segment, on the understanding that future resales are at a corresponding ‘below market’ price. This is the approach taken at SFU to provide much needed workforce housing/

The preferred markets might include owner-occupiers rather than investors, and those members of the workforce that the city would like to see living in the city. This would cost the city money, but would have the benefit of broadening the social/income mix and accelerating the number of sales…(Units should be priced so that the cost is still less than that estimated for renting units) I would note that similar approaches were used during the initial phase of South False Creek.

3. leasehold, rather than freehold sale, with graduated land lease payments…there are two approaches that might be considered…one a discounted prepaid lease with stepped payments at predeterminied dates in the future over the life of the lease, or graduated payment leases. Under this approach, the units would be differentiated from the other 230 sales, and the city would recover its money, but over time…indeed, it could recover more than from the discounted sales in 2011.

There are obviously other ideas…my concept however is to induce people to buy with creative financing provided the cost to the city is less than that of renting the units, noting the city will have to pay the HST, forego property tax payments, and refurbish the units at some point in the future. It will also have have to evict tenants when it’s ready to sell, and the challenges associated with this should not be under-estimated….

OK, over to you Roger, et al!

Roger, for what it’s worth…I agree with the 30% discount for the 230 units…I agree with keeping the more expensive units off of the market for now…my suggestions should be viewed as an alternative to the renting of units…that’s what worries me…for reasons set out before…cheers