Cheryl Rossi
Van. Courier
Those who purchase and move into a condo in the former Olympic Village can receive a free kayak, a bicycle, a year’s worth of groceries from Urban Fare, along with other incentives.
Those who aren’t lured by a year’s membership to a car co-op, a bus pass and a coffee every day for a year, can instead choose $5,000.
Full-page ads for the promotion hit print last month. Rosario Setticasi, president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, can’t remember seeing such enticements offered in the last decade. “This is the first one I hear, currently,” he said. “I’ve been in the business for 30 years. When the market gets competitive, builders get fairly competitive to get, basically, the attention of the consumer to their project.”
The real estate board reported that sales of condos in Metro Vancouver saw a 2.1 per cent increase last month compared to August 2010, but a 34.8 per cent decrease compared to August 2009. The board focuses primarily on re-sales. Bob Rennie, principal of Rennie Marketing Systems which created the ads, says his firm needed to differentiate The Village on False Creek from other developments. “We all look through the newspaper, you receive direct mail, you look online, often everything looks the same. It’s Vancouver. There’s a seawall and there’s somebody windsurfing and there’s somebody rollerblading and there’s somebody eating an apple,” he said. “What lifestyle do you need here that you might not necessarily need in another development. You may not buy the bigger suite with the view looking at the water, but you can still take your kayak out.”
The incentives, valued at more than $7,500, are covered by the project’s marketing budget and Rennie says offering them makes good business sense when you consider accumulating interest, maintenance costs and property taxes for unsold units.
“If this accelerates sales, the cost of $5,000 is nothing” he said. “It’s not desperation, it’s lifestyle.”
Rennie maintains incentives aren’t out of the
ordinary. He notes those who bought into the Woodward’s development didn’t have to pay property taxes
for three years. Ernst and Young, the receiver for the troubled project, continues to consider renting addi–
tional unsold condo units to swiftly populate the area, but Rennie says the business case for doing so is weak because occupation triggers the payment of HST.
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