Want a piece of this? $620k to start
SUSAN LAZARUK
The Province
Vancouver House, a twisted building at the north end of the Granville Street Bridge, is still at least a year from being built, and if you want in, be prepared to shell out a minimum of $620,000.
And that’s for a 400-square-foot one-bedroom/flex suite, which works out to $1,550 a square foot. The average cost per square foot of Vancouver condos in August was just over $1,000 a square foot, but $1,250 a square foot in Yaletown, according to realtor Steve Saretzky’s website, the Vancity Condo Guide.
The 49-storey building sold out within weeks of marketing years ago.
But some suites are being offered for reassignment online. (Pre-sale condominiums are exempt from a law passed last year to restrict the sale of assignments, to prevent flipping realtors from double-dipping on commission fees.)
The 400-sq.-ft. suite, which also has a 126-sq.-ft. balcony, is on the third floor of the building at 1480 Howe St., in what’s called the “Beach District.”
Another condo — almost 2,100sq. ft., three bedrooms and four bathrooms, on the 36th floor and with a wraparound balcony — recently sold for $3.2 million, or about $1,470 per sq. ft.
Vancouver House, which includes 375 condo suites ranging from studios to four-bedrooms, 105 rental suites, a retail area, a library, fitness centre, 25-metre heated pool on a living roof visible from the Granville Street Bridge and a fleet of BMWs for residents to share, is 151 metres tall.
That makes it the city’s fifth tallest building after Living Shangri-La (201 m), the Trump International Hotel and Tower (188 m), Telus Garden Residential Tower (167 m), and the Private Residences at Hotel Georgia (158 m), according to skyscrapercenter. com.
The building is unique in that it sits on a 6,500-sq.-ft. triangular shaped base and increases in square footage incrementally starting at the 12th storey to end up being double that in size and rectangular-shaped by the top floor, said Carl MacDonald, senior project manager at Bjarke Ingels Group, the Danish architectural firm that designed it.
It is scheduled to be completed by spring of 2019.
The project is to eventually include two other buildings, one on either side of the bridge, housing commercial and office space.
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