Peter Mitham
Other
There was a time, five years ago, when press releases regularly hit this columnist’s in-box trumpeting long lineups and same-day sell-outs of condo projects.
“Some buyers actually tried to line up last week to get the jump on other buyers,” remarked an announcement for Richmond’s Versante project in 2005.
Another, just a few months later, saw Cressey Development Corp. vice-president Hani Lammam’s comment that Lotus, also in Richmond, caused, “a lineup down the block; one Realtor lined up at 5:30 am in the cold.… It was a bit like Boxing Day.”
Photos sent to the press often showed throngs of eager Asian buyers, a phenomenon repeating itself today with reports of 400 people queuing for a crack at Eight West in New Westminster and hopeful buyers at the second phase of Quintet in Richmond lining up three days in advance of the launch.
The presence of offshore – read, Chinese – interests in the lines is being hotly debated in a way it wasn’t five years ago. The most recent figures, circulated to media last week by MAC Marketing Solutions (which handled marketing of Lotus), notes that of 500 buyers in the first five months of this year, approximately two-thirds were of Chinese descent but, of these, just three listed an address in China as their primary residence.
“What’s really happening is we are largely selling to immigrating Chinese purchasers, who are choosing to live, and to invest in Vancouver,” Cameron McNeill, president of MAC, concluded.
But if you look at where the cheques for those immigrating buyers are coming from, said Jeff Hancock of market research firm MPC Intelligence Inc., it’s clear that Chinese money is what’s driving sales.
“You start asking them where their deposit cheques are coming from, and you start seeing a huge proportion of their deposit cheques are coming straight from China,” Hancock said.
While this doesn’t obviously mean the buyers are all resident in China, it does mean that sales are not connected with local economic factors. Hancock goes so far as to say the environment is complex enough to prevent any one set of data from effectively tracking buyer origins.
Still, a mix of smart marketing by developers and savvy and strategic decision-making on the part of buyers is giving Chinese buyers an edge in lineups. And the more of them there are, the more successful a project will be, regardless of what the rest of the real estate market is doing.
“Make no mistake,” Hancock said. “They are driving the new home market.”
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