School is out for most students, but the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) is studiously proceeding with expansion plans for its campuses in Abbotsford and Chilliwack.
UFV has listed its Chilliwack North campus at Airport and Yale roads with Cushman & Wakefield Ltd. Proceeds from the sale of the 27-acre site will fund development of a new $45 million campus on 85 acres at Canada Education Park (on the former site of CFB Chilliwack). The property is listed at $30 million.The school is also working with Abbotsford to develop a plan for the area surrounding its growing campus located south of Highway 1 and bisected by King Road. UFV has 47 acres in Abbotsford but will require 20 to 40 acres over the next 50 years, according to Craig Toews, director of campus planning for UFV.
“It will provide a vision for future build-out and amenities that will really serve the community but also serve our students as they’re looking for options for affordable housing, and amenities such as food and services,” Toews said of the so-called U District planning initiative.
Boosting amenities on and in the vicinity of its campuses is also important because the university is trying to become more campus-oriented rather than a commuter school. Moreover, limited transit connections between campuses means they require a critical mass of their own. This is in part why a $15 million student centre is being built at the Abbotsford campus.
“[While] trying to evolve from our roots as a commuter college to a full university we need amenities on campus,” Toews said, “and this whole U District piece plays into that.”
Great Canadian Gaming Corp. has been an active player in the Fraser Valley market this spring, picking up a Chilliwack bingo hall and a Surrey development site.
The casino operator, which last year raked in revenue of $383.5 million, acquired the assets and undertakings of the Chilliwack Bingo Association at the beginning of June for a base amount of $10 million. The deal gives Great Canadian a bingo hall and a five-acre development site where it plans to develop a community gaming centre. The bingo association could receive further proceeds from the deal if Great Canadian successfully develops a gaming centre on the five-acre site.
The deal in Chilliwack follows the purchase of a 25-acre site at 14933 Colebrook Road a month earlier by 0871194 B.C. Ltd., a company whose principal is Great Canadian executive chairman and CEO Ross McLeod. The purchase price was $7.7 million, $2.2 million below the list price, and gives McLeod approximately 19 acres net for mixed-use development.
McLeod didn’t return calls for comment on the deals.
There was a time, five years ago, when press releases regularly hit this columnist’s in-box trumpeting long lineups and same-day sell-outs of condo projects.
“Some buyers actually tried to line up last week to get the jump on other buyers,” remarked an announcement for Richmond’s Versante project in 2005.
Another, just a few months later, saw Cressey Development Corp. vice-president Hani Lammam’s comment that Lotus, also in Richmond, caused, “a lineup down the block; one realtor lined up at 5:30 am in the cold. … It was a bit like Boxing Day.”
Photos sent to the press often showed throngs of eager Asian buyers, a phenomenon repeating itself today with reports of 400 people queuing for a crack at Eight West in New Westminster and hopeful buyers at the second phase of Quintet in Richmond lining up three days in advance of the launch.
The presence of offshore – read, Chinese – interests in the lines is being hotly debated in a way it wasn’t five years ago. The most recent figures, circulated to media last week by MAC Marketing Solutions (which handled marketing of Lotus), notes that of 500 buyers in the first five months of this year, approximately two-thirds were of Chinese descent but, of these, just three listed an address in China as their primary residence.
“What’s really happening is we are largely selling to immigrating Chinese purchasers, who are choosing to live, and to invest in Vancouver,” Cameron McNeill, president of MAC, concluded.
But if you look at where the cheques for those immigrating buyers are coming from, said Jeff Hancock of market research firm MPC Intelligence Inc., it’s clear that Chinese money is what’s driving sales.
“You start asking them where their deposit cheques are coming from, and you start seeing a huge proportion of their deposit cheques are coming straight from China,” Hancock said.
While this doesn’t obviously mean the buyers are all resident in China, it does mean that sales are not connected with local economic factors. Hancock goes so far as to say the environment is complex enough to prevent any one set of data from effectively tracking buyer origins.
Still, a mix of smart marketing by developers and savvy and strategic decision-making on the part of buyers is giving Chinese buyers an edge in lineups. And the more of them there are, the more successful a project will be, regardless of what the rest of the market is doing.
“Make no mistake,” Hancock said. “They are driving the new home market.”