But that’s after he sells Shangri-La units
Malcolm Parry
Sun
On a Wall Centre patio, Bob Rennie and Peter and Bruno Wall happily view theirs and others’ city projects.
Ian Gillespie and son Ryan broke ground for the Shangri-La tower and should for its Toronto successor.
Bob Rennie, the condo-sales whirlwind, and developer Ian Gillespie will spend today interviewing candidates to sell units in the Shangri-La project.
That’s not our 60-floor Shangri-La, which is already rising above ground at Georgia and Thurlow Street. It’s the 68-floor successor Westbank Projects principal Gillespie and frequent partner Ben Yeung’s city-based Peterson Investment Group will build at University and Adelaide Street in Toronto.
Rennie will hurry home from Hogtown to attend to several projects here.
They include Gillespie and Yeung’s the Estates at Fairmont Pacific Rim, a 173-unit, downtown-waterfront condominium complex in which buyers are paying $2,100 per square foot for what Rennie calls “the front-row seats.”
By that, he means the “full-on, water-facing” units, one of which Rennie has sold to himself. He and partner Carey Fouks will occupy it after vacating their austerely chic concrete-and-glass pad near Granville Island.
As for his other sales activities, Rennie told Wall Financial Corp. head Peter Wall this week: “Basically, I’m employed until the Olympics.”
For Wall and nephew Bruno, he’s selling downtown’s “most affordable” opposite to the flossy Fairmont complex. It’s a 112-unit former rental property at 1010 Howe St. the Walls are converting to $299,000 condos, plus eight higher-priced penthouses.
“Peter knows he can never duplicate this,” Rennie said of 1010 Howe. “But he’s going to try when he launches the Capitol this fall.”
That’s a 350-unit condo complex on the old Capitol Six movie-theatre site, where condo prices should begin around $300,000.
Rennie is also selling Wall Centre Richmond’s 285 condo units. That’s a $175-million, two-tower complex at No. 3 Road and Sea Island Way, which will include a Westin hotel.
After that, in spring 2007, there’ll be 350 or more units to offer in a $200-million, four-building complex the Walls will build on False Creek south.
Rennie will literally work both sides of the street when that project launches. He’ll also sell the 800 units when Peter and Shahram Malek’s Millennium Group begins its $500-million-range Olympic Village project in the fall of next year. That’s the 2.5-hectare site for which the Maleks paid $193 million.
Meanwhile, Rennie is on to the 140-unit second phase of Millennium’s One Madison Avenue at Lougheed Highway and Dawson in Burnaby, where prices average $475,000. And, with prices 21/2 times higher, he’s wrapping up his smallest project — the Maleks’ 79-unit Water’s Edge complex on West Vancouver’s old Park Royal Hotel site.
On downtown Hastings Street, where he moved the Woodward’s redevelopment project’s 536 units in one day, Rennie is taking longer with Tom and Tony Pappajohn’s 132-unit Jameson House, where prices are breaking $1,000 a foot. He’s sold two-thirds of developer Andrew Grant’s Cambie-and-Broadway Crossroads project’s 88 units in two months. And for Riverport developer Brent Kerr, he’s handling another Richmond project — the 144-unit Waterstone Pier, which he said is “eight metres from the water” at Steveston Highway’s eastern end.
With all this, and his habitual purchase of condo units, you’d think Rennie might do some developing himself. “Then I’d lose all my friends,” he said jumping into the grey-green 2005 Bentley Continental coupe he used to call his “dinner car.”
Turns out, that’s on the block, too. A brown 2007 successor is due any day.
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Simon Lim says he’s ready to replace a West Georgia Street eyesore with an Arthur Erickson-designed tower that may rival the architect’s iconic MacMillan-Bloedel building a block away at Thurlow Street.
City hall turned down Lim’s first proposal for the site, but acquiesced when Erickson penned a building that twists 45 degrees in the 600 feet between sidewalk and summit.
That feature reflects the project’s twisted history. The site still contains the gutted skeleton of the old Shell Oil building that was to have become the Newport City Country & Club until that Hong Kong-based project collapsed in 1995.
After the usual reworking, Erickson’s reputedly costly design went through its sixth and final revision — window mullions and structure — in late June, and is now a go, Lim said.
Although the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain should announce its participation in the project momentarily, Lim remains mum. Meanwhile, he has acquired the Bay Parkade and Salvation Army hostel buildings, and is “talking” with architect Richard Henriquez about triple-use development of the Seymour-and-Dunsmuir sites.
No word on a time frame. “I don’t want to put the city’s knickers in a knot, like Greg Kerfoot,” Lim said. He was referring to the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team owner’s proposed $65-million, downtown-waterfront stadium, which caused considerable foofaraw before council gave it unanimous but conditional approval Tuesday.
As for Vancouver’s continuing building and property-values boom, Lim sees it long beyond the 2010 talisman date. Picking a lucky number for Chinese, he said: “We’re talking about the 2028 Olympics — and then the crash.”
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Shelley Gillen’s leading-lady looks could have her acting in big-screen movies and small-screen series instead of finding money for them.
But the head of creative affairs at Corus Entertainment’s Movie Central pay-TV network will likely stick to that financing job.
Gillen and other Movie Central managers will allocate $23 million this year and $25 million in 2007 to support theatrical-release films and, increasingly, non-theatrical movies and original dramatic series.
Locals appreciate her saving them the cost of “a $5,000 cup coffee,” by which she means what it costs a West-Coast independent moviemaker to pitch his or her project in Toronto.
She also pushes hard for still-unknown moviemakers in whom she sees potential.
City-based Anagram Pictures found that out when she went to bat for Fido director Andrew Currie’s first movie, Mile Zero, and Trent Carlson’s subsequently feted The Delicate Art of Parking. So did Karl Besai for Johnny and later films. And she helped steer Angus Fraser’s Victoria-shot Terminal City into a widely lauded story divided into 10 one-hour segments.
As well as the appearance, she’s got the professional background to play numerous screen characters.
Gillen could be the hard-nosed reporter she was at the Toronto Sun, where she learned “you could always get stories about murder or bashing [late prime minister Pierre Elliott] Trudeau on page 2, opposite the Sunshine Girl.”
She could reprise her real-life role as a songwriter whose charted Ricky was about “a murdered hooker and a guy who recognized her as a girl he’d gone to school with.”
She could be the sculptor who studied at Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Academy. Or the equestrian gymkhana competitor who was rocketed off the back of pinto pony Orbit 40 times the day her dad brought that cranky little horse home.
“But I kept getting back on and getting back on and getting back on,” Gillen said. Not long later, she was soaring over high rails aboard a more compliant and considerably bigger white horse named Beauty.
She figures Canuck moviemakers and pay-TV operators like Movie Central can also aim high.
“We can rival [U.S. giant] HBO with world-class original programming in Canada,” Gillen said, claiming shows like Terminal City, ReGenesis and Slings and Arrows are heading in the direction of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and other HBO blockbusters.
“The level of craft, the lighting, the performing is all feature-film quality [and] pay TV is where all the top writers will want to go” Gillen said. As pertinently, “Its viewership is so much bigger than for Canadian feature films, and pay TV allows feature filmmakers access to that viewership.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006