Sunshine Coast, BC - Its collapsing real estate market.

[Skook]

Developer:
I'm glad to go I cannot tell a lie
Adieu, adieu to you and you and you

Response:
So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye
I heave a sigh and say goodbye…Goodbye!

Another developer is “fleeing Dodge” (Sechelt) and appears to have been trying to do so for a few years. Today, this new land listing appeared on SC Realtor Gary Little’s Interactive Real Estate Map:

After seeing the listing, I googled to see what District of Sechelt history I could find on this development and it was slim pickings; I found only two document entries. The first was in the DOS Parks and Open Spaces Master Plan, July 2006 on pg. 1:

Quote:The Havies Road subdivision (named Davis Lookout) includes a 1.13 ha site for a communal septic system and a .52 ha park dedication. Although the septic field has moderate slope it could serve as a field area for unstructured recreation activities.

The second entry was in the DOS 2010 Official Community Plan (OCP) on pg. 68 under ‘Recent Parks Acquisitions”:

Quote:A small park area dedicated at the Davis Lookout subdivision at Havies Road in Davis Bay (.52 ha).

I could find nothing on zoning and because of that and those two entries above, I concluded the subdivision zoning occurred in 2006 or earlier. So, I headed to Google Earth to get the lay of the land. On the top left, we can see the block and its proximity to the ocean on the left (west) and the Sechelt Airport on the right (east). On the top right, is the Sechelt Zoning map. Block A lies in L 1379.

What we see in these close-up GE shots is that the land was cleared by 2004 and judging by the greening up the logging occurred in stages from 2001 to 2003. GE shows no activity in 2006, but that changes by 2009. By 2013, those cleared areas have begun to fill in (alder and Scottish broom, no doubt) so whatever was planned had halted soon after 2009. Havies Road runs horizontal below the block and the vertical roughed in road within that small square runs into Laurel Ave to the south.

Seeing that activity in the 2009 got me back to searching using every term I could think of and I finally got lucky when I discovered it went by the address 5038 Laurel Ave, too. Based on search results, this block of land was purchased by Vancouver developer Rize Alliance Properties likely in 2006 when real estate was booming on the coast. That same year, a preliminary layout approval (PLA) was obtained from the DOS for a 79 lot bare land strata subdivision with lots ranging in size from 0.19 acres to 0.21 acres.

Riza began to hire firms to design the various aspects of the project:

• Architecture by by Stuart Howard, John Hollifield, Formwerks, and Ramsey Wordern Architects
  
• Interior design by Cause & Affect
  
• Landscape Architecture by Eckford and Associates.
  

The development was renamed “The Homes of Davis Bay” (previously was Davis Lookout) and by mid-2007 the website was up. In June 2008, the project was profiled on the blog Presales Condos & Pre-Construction Real Estate which informed readers that the Sales Centre for The Homes at Davis Bay pre-construction sales was located on site at 5038 Laurel Ave and open between 10:30am and 5:00pm except Fridays.

Visitors to the sales centre would not view artist renderings of the homes but actual models which allowed them to lift the roofs and peer inside (I can't imagine the price tag on these homes):

The interior design company, Cause+Affect, put together a little video in 2007 that was added to the development’s website - to give viewers a sense of how their lives would be transformed by choosing to live at ‘The Homes on Davis Bay’ in particular and on the Sunshine Coast in general. Believe it or not, Cause+Affect uploaded that video to YouTube and Vimeo.com this past January. Take a peek, it’s short.

So with everything ticking right along, what happened? Well, on September 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection which initiated a US financial crisis that went viral. In response, the stock market had a meltdown which deepened the US recession that had kicked off in November 2007 in response to the US housing collapse.

The repercussions were felt everywhere even on the Sunshine Coast as development after development was mothballed as credit tightened and buyers disappeared. Some developers went bankrupt (Silverback on Porpoise Bay, Seaview Villa Estates) while others waited for better times which never came.

At some point, Rize Alliance Properties listed its Davis Bay land with Mark Lester at Colliers International perhaps as early as 2009; the asking price - $4,750,000. Google took me to the Colliers flyer (2 pg. pdf) which is in the database of Lester’s new business site Specialized Assests. The listing is not active there nor is it among the sold properties. So, Rize gave up on Lester at some point and just a few days ago listed with Holywell Properties in Sechelt at $3,500,000 - a price drop of -26.3%.

Interestingly enough, I can’t find any current commercial listing for the land. Nothing came up in my Google searches and I checked both NAI Commerical and MacDonald Commercial - nada. This is strictly an MLS listing with a Sunshine Coast Realtor. I wonder what this tells us?

The development is still on the ‘Projects’ page of the Rize website and can still be found on BuzzBuzzHome.com with the last update there occurring on July 5, 2012. Oh, at Buzz, it says ‘The Homes on Davis Bay’ is “sold out” - in their dreams.

After posting, I decided to try one more search using a different search engine and got lucky, again. I was able to grab the site plan. There were four different home designs and I think it is safe to assume they would be oriented towards the ocean view which would be on the left.