In Vancouver: Ritz Carlton Condo-Hotel Project Cancelled

Missed opportunity of what could have been a great Development.

The Holborn Group stopped its 60-storey Ritz-Carlton project in downtown Vancouver after only 62 of the 123 units were sold. The $500-million luxury hotel and condominium project featured a 20-storey hotel topped by 40 storeys of condos.

“The development would have been the second-tallest building in the city and was scheduled to be completed in 2011.
Prices ranged from between $2.5 million and $10 million, with the penthouse set at $28 million. Buyers will get their deposits refunded.” -The Canadian Press

Reasons: Lack of pre-sales and the current economic downturn

“To get financing, you need a certain amount of presales – and because we didn’t have enough units sold, financing didn’t turn out the way we wanted,” Holborn president Joo Kim Tiah said yesterday.
Those sales didn’t meet the threshold of 75 the company, and potential lenders, were looking for, so the project was put on ice. – Globe and Mail

Media Round-Up: Home Buyers Leading the Canadian Real Estate Market

First-time home buyers could lead a rebound in Canada’s real estate market

Thanks to lower prices and shifting demographics.
Phil Soper of Brookfield Real Estate Services says a combination of factors are attracting first-time buyers back to the market after they checked out in large numbers at the end of 2008.
National average home prices were down 11 per cent in January compared to a year earlier.
Soper says this, along with historically low mortgage rates and a buyers’ market, are working to attract first-time buyers.
And Scotiabank senior economist Adrienne Warren says baby boomers’ children will soon begin to enter the real estate market in droves, further boosting housing sales.
Soper and Warren were speaking in Toronto as part of Scotiabank’s annual real estate conference.

Source: The Canadian Press

Housing market advantage swings from seller to buyer

It’s a good time to buy a house but a bad time to sell one, according to some reports released Wednesday.

The most recent Teranet-National Bank composite house-price index — a measure of six major urban markets across Canada — showed house prices in December down 0.6 per cent from a year earlier.

“It confirms that by year end, after more than five years of seller’s-market conditions, Canadian housing as a whole had become a buyer’s market,” National Bank Financial said in a statement accompanying the numbers.

Source: Canada.com

Describing Homes: what’s a 3 1/2 and all those numbers means.

If you are new to Montreal, you’ve probably seen the descriptions for the living space, apartments or homes, signs with 2 ½, or 5 ½ as opposed to “one bedroom condo/home” or “3 bedroom apartment” sort of thing. If you haven’t figured it out yet, here is a quick (and hopefully clear) explanation.

Understanding the way we describe apartments in Montreal can be quite simple once you keep these tips in mind.

First and foremost, remember that the “1/2″ half part, always refers to a bathroom.
After that, every room is counted.

For example: Read more >>

Realtors coming and going…

photo: Benoit Remillard

While in Calgary (and other parts of the country), Real Estate agents are leaving the business, in Quebec the ACAIQ had an increase of licenses renewals this year:

Malgré la récession et le marché de la revente qui baisse, le nombre de courtiers et d’agents immobiliers atteint un sommet au Québec.

«L’ACAIQ vient de connaître le plus grand renouvellement de permis de courtiers et d’agents de son histoire, soit 17 500, comparativement à un peu plus de 16 000 un an plus tôt», a précisé hier Robert Nadeau.
Source: La Presse

Old Montreal Building Getting a New Face

Photo: Deya Bautista

If you visit old Montreal often you’ve probably seen this building. Near the corner of Notre Dame and St. Laurent, right next to the Starbucks. The building is empty, and has been for well over a decade- according to local merchants. You can see the broken windows, patched with wooden planks and the interior structure deteriorating, it’s now the home of dozens of pigeons in the area.
Just a week ago, I happen to see a crew of workers attaching something on the front, they were not there to renovate the premises but to cover the entire exterior with a big sign.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me that moment, but I noticed the artwork was not an advertisement (like the one here), but simply an identical image of the real building – on it’s glory days, back when it was young and beautiful.

Apparently, they missed on some of their calculations; the sign was to small for the building and the crew had to go back to their workshops. We’ll be seeing them later, with the new and improved face for this structure.

Friday Morning Market News

photo: Deya Bautista

• Home building across Canada is expected to fall back this year by 25%. [Globe and Mail]
• In Montreal, resale home prices are not expected to drop as much as the rest of the country. [CEP News]
• Housing Projects in Montreal had a fantastic “Open house weekend” with 6682 visits in total. [La Presse]

A gas leak on my neighbourhood

We heard the sirens, the trucks going by. The roads were closed, and this time not for repairs, the whole area smelled! We had a gas leak on Rue Notre Dame yesterday in Old Montreal. According to the Gazette it happened when “workers hit a gas line during repairs to the street.”

The workers hit a gas line!! Aren’t they the pros, knowing where to dig, how deep and when to stop? The whole block stank like gas. I smelled it all the way from St Laurent corner, but the fire trucks where all over the construction area of Notre Dame between Francois-Xavier and St-Pierre. Not in 500 Place d’Armes like Gazette reported.

Anyhow, it was a good scare. Enough to make me take my car and “go for a coffee” away from home, until things clear out a bit. On the way back I was praying that my building didn’t go up in flames. What if someone lit up a cigarette in the street? I hoped not.

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