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Vancouver, from the day the first train pulled in, has always done
well by gatherings of outsiders
 Will
the Winter Games help or hinder the metropolitan Vancouver real estate
market, or hardly have any affect? Opinion, of course, is divided. Who
can know the future?
The past, however, suggests Vancouver real estate is simultaneously exceptional
and unexceptional.
Advances and retreats in value, and supply and demand, occur here just
as they do in any other metropolis.
But whatever occurs here occurs in a physically singular and culturally
diverse geography and occurs because the living here is better than there,
not cheaper, but better.
The first private sale of Canadian Pacific Railway land, in 1886, is
illustrative of the course of the better-life attraction of Vancouver
residency.
The buyer was Walter Graveley, a small-town Ontario native who had done
well by real estate in Manitoba. When values there retreated, he came
to British Columbia and never left.
He was a co-founder of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and lived long
enough to be among those inaugural Vancouver voters who gathered at the
old Fairmont Hotel Vancouver in 1936 to celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the city's incorporation.
In 1886, Vancouver was already an ethnically diverse place.
In the 1881 census, Vancouver residents reported 20 different ethnic
or national attachments; in 1891, even more.
Strathcona particularly emerged as a neighbourhood of working class residents,
from China and Japan and Italy, followed by South Vancouver.
By the Great War, there was a genuine downtown skyline to the west of
Strathcona, capped by the claims of first the Dominion Building, at Hastings
and Cambie, and then the World Building, at Pender and Beatty, now better
known as the Sun Tower, as tallest buildings in the British Empire.
The municipalities of Point Grey, South Vancouver, and Vancouver would
amalgamate as the Great Depression was beginning in 1929. Even during
that period the demand for housing continued, with apartment buildings
appearing along Oak and Granville Streets and in Kitsilano.
Renting rather than home ownership became the norm in the late '60s as
affordability soared beyond the reach of many and a snapshot of the cityscape
at the time reveals both low and highrise residential buildings in many
areas. The shift to attached residency was noticeable by the middle '70s
with the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver issuing guides on what
the Strata Property Act meant for consumers.
Political unrest through the '50s, '60s, and '70s in Europe, Africa,
and the Middle East sent people to Canada, and a swell of immigration
from South Asia began in the late 1970s.
But it was the influx of Hong Kong money leading up to 1997, and the
end of Crown colony status there, that really demarcated a hugely visible
influx of overseas investment.
"People flight and capital flight," says George Wong of Magnum
Projects, a veteran organizer of local real estate sales and marketing
campaigns. "There are two reasons why people look for a safe haven
for their families and their money, free from political instability."
George Wong's mother left China's Hunan province in 1949, frightened
by how her "bourgeois" family might be treated under Communist
rule.
The family settled in Hong Kong, but tumultuous protests there against
the Cultural Revolution had her feeling unsettled again. In 1973, the
family began looking overseas, well in advance of Hong Kong's handover
date to China in 1997.
"Some Hong Kong families were very forward thinking, they took the
long view," says Wong. "Vancouver was very attractive because
it's like the Switzerland of North America."
Safe, stable, with an excellent quality of life and the advantage of
being one direct flight away from Asia, Vancouver interested many. Generous
rules around an ''investor'' category smoothed the way for individual
families to immigrate in the late '20s and early '90s, but also led to
criticism that Hong Kong Chinese were ''buying'' Canadian citizenship.
There were also rumbles of discontent over the perception the Hong Kong
buyers had artificially inflated prices with their sudden influx of demand
for residential property, or that they were absentee landlords, detrimental
to the social fabric of individual buildings.
"The resentment, I think, came from the conspicuousness of the wave
of spending," says Wong.
Many immigrants from Hong Kong at the time chose to start fresh with
their Canadian households, picking up an expensive car or two, furnishing
sizable empty homes from top to bottom, or even tearing down existing
houses to build new ones.
"It was obvious change that was too much, too fast," Wong points
out gently. "I don't think Canadians are prejudiced, but it's human
nature to see a new element as an outsider. This is true even within sub-groups
of the Chinese community."
There could hardly have been a more conspicuous purchase by a Hong Kong
presence than Li Ka-shing's acquisition of the former Expo 86 lands on
the north shore of False Creek, for $320 million.
Matt Meehan worked for the world fair and on the sale of the site to
Li Ka-shing. Now a senior vice-president with Concord Pacific -- the company
developing the massive parcel of land -- he remembers how people working
on Expo knew it would be huge, even though the fair didn't seem to register
on public consciousness in the Lower Mainland until it was halfway over.
"You have to remember, back then, people were handing around cassette
tapes. Unless you'd been to an exposition, people didn't know," Meehan
says. "It's not like the electronic age now where if you want to
look at anything you can just go to the Internet."
He believes the purchase and development of the Expo lands as one cohesive
parcel was the catalyst for what has been dubbed Vancouverism: high-rises
developed to complement natural landscapes and community-building amenities
like parks and public space.
"If the Expo lands had been chopped up into five or six parcels,
we never would have seen the number of parks we have in Downtown South,"
Meehan says. "I remember when the Urban Fare [grocery store] went
in at Davie and Marinaside, people really got a sense that there's a neighbourhood
here."
He also remembers the concept of pre-sales -- putting down a deposit
on a condo not yet built -- as being something in which Vancouver led
the way for the rest of Canada.
"It was something quite familiar to Hong Kong buyers, but pretty
foreign for others," Meehan says. "It was quite a new thing
to commit to buying a place just by looking at a floor plan, and then
waiting a couple of years."
The historical push to buy property in Vancouver has neither been limited
just to residences nor to the Hong Kong market. Commercial real estate
investment and development analyst Clare Stevens, now with the firm DTZ
Barnicke, recalls a boom in selling fully tenanted office buildings in
1978.
"Companies needed space to house the baby-boomer workers,"
says Stevens. "There was more European investment at that time, and
purchases from large financial interests like SunLife and Great West Life
Insurance."
The 1982 North American recession put a severe damper on commercial real
estate development, but it roared back by the late '80s. However, Stevens
says a change in tax policy in the early '90s under the NDP scared away
many international investors. The Asian financial collapse of 1997 also
virtually eliminated investment from Japan.
In recent days, there have been nibbles from abroad, but "nothing
solid," Stevens says. He's not expecting a boom in commercial real
estate investment after the 2010 Winter Games, because he simply doesn't
see the demand for it in Vancouver.
George Wong of Magnum Projects says healthy residential real estate investment
continued in the 1990s from the Taiwanese, and into 2003-2004 from mainland
China. He says super ultra-high net worth individuals (i. e., the rich)
from all over the world are continuing to buy Vancouver homes to serve
as vacation properties. Some of that spending has in turn led to business-related
investment, as the newcomers establish a feeling of connection to their
playground.
"I think we're an international city that's incredibly livable,
and that we've become a world resort destination," Wong says with
a smile.
Concord Pacific's Matt Meehan takes it a little bit further, saying Vancouver's
success with livable neighbourhoods downtown is being studied with interest
by many international cities.
"Expo 86 was a chance for the world to discover us," he says.
"Maybe the Olympics are a means for us to show the way."
Broadcaster and reporter Claudia Kwan is a regular contributor to Westcoast
Homes. She reads correspondence at twitter.com/thatclaudiakwan.
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Newsletter:
03 September 2010 to 10 September 2010 - Focus on Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa
