Eager buyers snap up Downtown Eastside development
Chad Skelton
Sun
VANCOUVER – Many thought it would be a tough sell: High-end condos, some costing more than a million dollars, in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
But as of 6:30 p.m. Saturday — less than 12 hours after sales began — every single one of the 536 condo units at Woodward’s had been purchased.
“We’re sold out,” Bob Rennie, the seasoned condominium marketer who organized the sale, said Sunday.
In all, Rennie and his staff sold more than $200 million worth of property — the largest single day of sales in his career.
The quick sell-off exceeded even Rennie’s optimistic prediction that 90 per cent of the units would sell the first day.
With large-scale advertising tagging Woodward’s as an “intellectual property,” Rennie said he targeted a specific group — first-time homeowners in their mid-20s and mid-30s — who were willing to live in a grittier neighbourhood.
“They didn’t want to live in a standardized, homogenized environment,” said Rennie. “They wanted something that’s leading edge.”
Thousands of people phoned in on April 13 to get colour-coded wristbands that determined their place in line on Saturday.
Prices started at around $235,000 for the smallest units, at around 590 square feet, and topped out at just over $1 million for 1,100 square feet and a view.
When the Woodward’s redevelopment is completed in 2009 — 16 years after the department store closed its doors — its residents will be living in one of the poorest and most drug-infested neighbourhoods in Canada.
And they will be sharing their building with 200 social housing units on the bottom 12 floors.
However, the condos in Woodward’s will feature high-end finishing, such as polished stone countertops.
And the building will house recreational facilities, a grocery store, a drugstore and Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts.
Rennie said he envisions more large-scale developments in the Downtown Eastside in the years to come.
“I really believe the city is moving east,” he said. “It’s got nowhere else to go.”
He said he hopes the Woodward’s project can serve as a model for the rest of the Downtown Eastside — a way of slowly gentrifying the area without kicking out its poorest residents.
“The less fortunate and the fortunate living together is a model for the future…. It works. So let’s do some more of it,” he said. “Why don’t we go in and take some of these rundown single-room-occupancy buildings, rebuild them and put condos on top?”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006