Pender Harbour Development - Farrington Cove

[RFM]

Thanks for the great report.

I have told part of my story about Whittaker’s (right next door to Farrington Cove), but here’s the whole shebang.

In 2008 I met with Kevin Toth, who had redeveloped Lord Jim’s into the ‘Rockwater Secret Cove Resort.’ He was the developer from Calgary behind Whittaker’s, another of the notoriously unsuccessful projects at Pender Harbor. My particular ‘wrinkle’ was that I had a nice 1/4 acre lot in Palm Springs that was dropping in value at an alarming rate and Kevin was willing to consider a trade for one of his lots in Whittaker’s (trading property is a bizarre concept that rarely works out). We wined and dined at Rockwater and looked at Whittaker’s. In the end, I ended up keeping the lot in Palm Springs, selling it for a huge loss (look what someone built there!) and Kevin kept his Whittaker’s lots. One thing that struck me at the time was how the developers had piled into the Pender Harbor area, each buying a separate ‘strip’ of land adjoining the water and putting in separate entrance roads and infrastructure. It was the most artificial way of developing that part of the Coast I had seen and completely disregarded the typography and lacked any relationship to some more ‘holistic’ approach to development. I also had so many questions about why anyone would isolate themselves way up there in Pender Harbor, where you would buy groceries, how you would find a ‘running/cycling/etc.’ buddy, that I am sure I annoyed the heck out of my visit.

Like so many ‘developers’ Kevin’s commitment to the Sunshine Coast was short lived and he has moved on to become President and Chief Operating Officer of Skyline Hotels & Resorts, presumably at an attractive salary. I can imagine that his days at Pender Harbor are now just a memory (sad/bad/you name it), and his ‘legacy’ is a bit tarnished.

For my part, I lost as much money in Palm Springs as I probably would have lost at Whittaker’s, but I got out, invested elsewhere in Southern California at the bottom of the market and now look like I knew what I was doing; a minor ‘Oracle of Something Or Other.’

In any case, the future seems bleak to me for all those developments north of Sechelt. My guess is that they will eventually stabilize into vacation destinations at prices well below current prices.