MACbulk’s price-slashing strategy got sales moving again — to the tune of 400 condos in eight weeks
Kate Webb
Province
Prices of the one- to three-bedroom condos at The Morgan development in Surrey have been slashed dramatically. A two-bedroom-plus-den condo used to be $404,900 and is now $289,900. Photograph by: Photos by Les Bazso — The Province
Greater Vancouver’s housing prices are “bouncing along the bottom,” according to real-estate marketing mogul Cameron McNeill, but he thinks it won’t be long before sellers reclaim the upper hand they enjoyed for so long.
“The bubble has burst, but it’s starting to rebuild,” said McNeill, who is president of MAC Marketing Solutions, a Vancouver company he started 10 years ago that has marketed over 10,000 units for a total of about $4 billion in sales.
“My advice to anybody would be if you’re going to plan on living and buying in Greater Vancouver, consider buying in this market, because the prices and the interest rates combined with the fundamentals of this city make it a great time to buy.”
His comments echo recent announcements by the Greater Vancouver and Canadian Home Builders’ Associations, and are backed up by an initiative he started, during January’s near market standstill, to help developers cut costs by selling their inventory quickly.
Rather than surrendering to the slump, MAC breathed fresh air into the industry by launching a liquidation campaign called MACbulk that advertised reductions of 20 to 30 per cent, and sold $150 million in real estate — nearly 400 condos – in eight weeks.
“I like using the analogy that, prior to MACbulk, every project sold their real estate separately. It was like the Robson Street boutiques: you had the Armani and you had Bosa,” he said. “What we did is we created a one-stop shop for the liquidation of aggressively priced real estate. We created Costco.”
This time, MACbulk is supporting three developers (Embassy, Amacon and Intergulf) and four projects (Legacy in Burnaby, Cora in Coquitlam, The Morgan in Surrey, and Edgebrook in Abbotsford).
The high-end one- to three-bedroom condos have not changed, but their prices have been slashed dramatically. For example, a 953 square foot, two-bedroom-plus-den condo at The Morgan in Surrey, where homeowners have access to the community’s 8,200 sq. ft., two-level private club house, was previously $404,900, but is now $289,900.
McNeill said this is the first time in the eight years since the leaky-condo fiasco of the late ’90s that Greater Vancouver has experienced a housing downturn, but that efforts like his are going to reverse the trend.
“We still believe in Vancouver as a blue chip real estate city, because it is a safe place to own real estate,” he said. “It has a high degree of certainty for long-term growth . . . so I think [the slump] is going to last less than a year.”
So far, MACbulk’s latest campaign has tallied up another 200 condos and nearly $100 million in sales in the last month, and McNeill is in the planning stage of a third, top-secret campaign that he said will add something completely new to the mix.
In the meantime, his sales team of about 50 is busy racking up deals on the remaining condos in its four current projects. As of last week, there were fewer than 15 left at Legacy in Burnaby, fewer than 40 at Cora, fewer than 20 at The Morgan, and about 60 left at Edgebrook in Abbotsford.
“When [MACbulk] first came out, everyone was watching to see if it was going to be a success, and now that it’s working, I believe developers see it as a major catalyst for an active real estate market in the first quarter of 2009,” said McNeill.
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The facts
What: MACbulk Inventory Liquidation Sale.
Where: Burnaby, Coquitlam, Surrey and Abbotsford.
Developers: Embassy, Amacon and Intergulf.
Sizes: One- to three-bedroom condos.
Prices: $159,900 to approximately $500,000.
Open: MAC Core Team Hotline open every day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., various languages spoken.
More info: Phone the MAC Core Team Hotline at 604-633-9988, or visit www.macbulk.com.
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