Malcolm Parry
Sun
BUSINESS LUNCH: Michael de Cotiis often has the $19 curry in the Hastings-at-Thurlow Marriott Pinnacle hotel he developed. Today, he opts for the same-price halibut poached in olive oil. So does his 19-year sales-and-marketing agent, Grace Kwok, who would normally choose the $14 soup-and-sandwich offering, which today is lentil-and-spinach with bratwurst on a hoagy.
Through driving rain, they can barely see across Burrard Inlet to a de Cotiis development the city of North Vancouver approved recently. That’s the foot-of-Lonsdale Pier project, where Kwok will begin selling 600 residential units in March. Prices aren’t finalized, but the 400 units of the across-the-street Premier development Kwok sold two years ago for $450,000- $555,000 would likely fetch $200,000 more today.
The Pier site, moreover, is on the waterfront, When completed before 2010, the $200-million, four-building project will incorporate a national museum complex and a 100-room hotel with a huge-for-the-North Shore 5,000-square-foot ballroom and other convention-related amenities.
An operator hasn’t been named, but West Vancouver resident de Cotiis said Marriott “is very much in the top running.”
Meanwhile. de Cotiis quietly bought the 440-room Renaissance (across Hastings Street from the Pinnacle) for $30 million this summer. The deal committed him to a $20-million refurbishment of its public and guest rooms.
By July, de Cotiis should be starting the first two 15-floor buildings of a $150-million, 300-unit scheme on False Creek South, with two more to come. He recently completed a $200-million, 800-unit, two-tower project on Toronto’s Bay Street, and is beginning a 51-floor, 500-unit building nearby.
Kwok says she merely “consults” on de Cotiis’s Toronto and San Diego projects. Still, she, husband Stephen and 38 employees have sold all of his high-raise schemes, totalling 4,000 units, since 1987. Her debut was a seven-floor concrete building in the West End, where 44 units fetched $120,000 each.
A former CMHC director and Simon Fraser University governor, Kwok adapted Asia-style pre-selling here in 1984. That was during the cash famine of a market downturn that stripped many developers of the bank financing they’d relied on. By 1987, when de Cotiis signed on, an unprecedented two decades of optimism and appreciation were about to begin.
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Bruce Langereis, the Delta Land Development president, is actually closing a hotel — a venerable one at that.
It’s the 79-year-old Georgia Hotel at Georgia and Howe streets, where Langereis, 47, and five-month bride Diana will front a $150-ticket wingding New Year’s Eve, then padlock the joint. When it re-opens in 2010, $300 million will have been spent, a 48-floor commercial-residential tower designed by Jim Hancock and Hilda Heyvaerts will stand alongside, and the hotel should have been so thoroughly renovated “it will be the one where royalty stays again,” Langereis said.
By royalty, the Britannia secondary graduate and former waterfront heavy-duty mechanic meant the entertainers who long stayed there. Big-business guests, too, such as members of the Singapore-based Hii family that edged locals Rob Macdonald and Peter Wall to pay $62.8 million for the Georgia recently.
The Hiis knew what they were getting, having sold the building to Caleb Chan in a barrage of 1980s ownership changes precipitated by Nelson Skalbania and often involving then Macaulay Nicolls Maitland whiz realtor Andrea Eng.
Langereis is an old MNM (now Colliers International) hand himself. After quitting his big-wrench activities to take the B.C. Institute of Technology’s marketing-management course, he joined the realty firm — aiding Eng, Avtar Bains and the like — and eventually sold the old Oakridge police-station site to Delta Group chair and Delta Overseas Investments Pte. Ltd. managing director Tony Hii Yik Nan, aka Tony Hii.
When cousin Yuguan Hii returned to Singapore while developing the Conservatory project on the Oakridge site, Langereis said he protested: “You can’t leave. You’ve got a $60-million project going on.”
He says that’s when Tony Hii , who has since succeeded father Yii Chiong Hii as chair, said: “Why don’t you join us?”
A former Canadian free-style ski champ and climber who routinely scrambles up the Squamish Chief’s vertical main face, Langereis jumped to Delta’s presidency in January 1997. He’s since become a private pilot and “may” do some aerobatic flying, although not in the float-equipped Cessna 185 he plans to acquire.
Delta has offices in former 24 Hours of Le Mans racing driver Mark Galvin’s building at 1199 West Hastings Street, and has developed the $100-million-range Carina, Calisto and Cielo projects nearby. Recently, it acquired 1180 West Hastings Street, where, with the Japan-based Okabe Group it will build a 220-room hotel to be occupied by Okabe-owned Coast Hotels. That would empty the chain’s Denman Street property, which Delta and Okabe hope to rezone for conversion to condominiums, with appropriate public-amenity benefits.
In the bluer-sky realm, Langereis said Delta owns the only freehold parcel — 215 hectares — in the Soo Valley east and north of Whistler, and hopes to develop a 2,500-home townsite there. Market housing completed before the 2010 Winter Olympics would be offered to games organizers’ use “for free,” he said.
Name? “Bruceville,” Langereis said. Laughing, he added: The first nations involved will tell me what it should be called. It’s their traditional territory.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006