Pender Harbour Development - The Painted Boat

[Skook]

I would like to show you a real estate and/or investment nightmare unfolding up in Pender Harbour. These are active listings as of today for ¼ ownership shares at the Painted Boat Resort Spa & Marina on Lagoon Rd in Maderia Park. The Painted Boat is the only resort on the Sunshine Coast offering this type of unit buy-in and will likely be the last until sometime far, far into the future.

Let’s put the pricing of these ¼ shares in perspective.

The first newspaper article I’ve come across for the Painted Boat, ‘Pender Harbour revealed’, appeared in the Edmonton Journal in July, 2006. There’s that magical year again - year of the Sunshine Coast Land Rush. The reporter was interviewing Ken Delf, President of Painted Boat Development Ltd. Delf who along with his wife Alison,a director in the company, hail from Calgary. Construction on the 31-unit townhome resort was to commence in September and the pricing given for these on average 1,500sf units was $175,000 to $250,000.

Two years later in June, 2008, when construction had completed, a Vancouver Sun piece, ‘Painted Boat takes new bearing', informs us the unit pricing had increased. Now, it was from $209,900 to $284,900.

By September, 2012 a Vancouver Sun piece tells us all we need to know with its title, ‘Quarter-interest in Pender Harbour waterfront for $178,000’.

Now, what do think of today’s active listing prices shown above? Scary, aren’t they?

We can see the evolution of the Painted Boat’s pricing via its website, too, in the composite image below. The 2007 website screenshot was the development’s first website and I have increased the pricing to make it easier to read.

The next screenshot is from the Painted Boat’s revamped 2008 website and offers a few more details. That pricing continues into 2010. I can’t be sure of 2011 and 2012.

Lastly, you can see the pricing details as of today on the Painted Boat website.

There's a nice little interactive site map on the Painted Point website that despite its claim you can find out pricing, you can’t. However, it is interesting to explore.

I mentioned the Painted Boat in an April 22, 2013 Demographics post. Here is a quote from that post:

Quote:In 2008, a new resort development offering fractional ownership opened for business in Pender Harbour. Called 'The Painted Boat', it offered a spa facility and a high-end restaurant and I laughed when I saw the prices. Well, on October 21, 2012 it shut the restaurant down and announced it wouldn't reopen it until March or April, 2013. The resort GM, Ryan Schmidt, told the local press, "We ran it for four consecutive winters and it was a financial loss every single winter."

According to the Painted Boat website, the restaurant closed for the winter last month and will not reopen for regular service until May, 2014 - it’s closed for half the year!

I think the length of the restaurant closure and those current MLS unit listings above speak volumes about the state of affairs up there in Pender Harbour.

(P.S. Wouldn't Europeans roll their eye-balls to hear these townhomes referred to as "Villas." How so very North American of us, to take a grand, old European concept dumb it down and cheapen it. Nope, "dem ain't lorries, dem is trux."...LOL)