City of Vancouver number crunching reveals that it will absorb an estimated $40 to $50 million shortfall, if former Olympic Village units sell as expected and construction loans are paid.
Mayor Gregor Robertson announced April 8 that tens of millions of dollars in assets from Millennium Developments have been transferred to the city.
“We’ve been able to reduce the impact on taxpayers and help move the project forward,” he said in a release.
This was Robertson’s first concrete assessment of how big a shortfall the city will suffer, even though he has hinted to Business in Vancouver in the past that the chances were not good that Millennium would pay all of the $578 million that it currently owes the city.
The announcement comes days after the project’s marketer, Bob Rennie, told BIV that he was embarking on a new communications strategy by not saying how many conditional sales his team has secured.
Rennie will only release numbers for sales that are closed, he said.
The latest announcement was that there are 118 closed condo sales out of the 230 units that went on sale in February.
Rennie sold 263 of the 737 condo units in the project before the buildings were used as the athletes’ village at the 2010 Olympics.
That left 474 units, of which 230 went on sale in mid-February and 244 are being saved for a future sales launch.
Despite negative news coverage about a class action lawsuit alleging shoddy workmanship, Rennie’s sales success has been good enough for receiver Ernst & Young to agree to let him sell all but a handful of 110 units initially proposed to be rental housing. (See “Former Olympic Village gets new marketing plan” – BIV Daily News; April 6.)