Valued At $16 It Sold For $68 Million "In 7200 Seconds" – The Inside Story Of Vancouver’s Wildest Property Deal
By Tyler Durden
For the past four months we have been closely following the sheer bubble panic, if not outright insanity, that has gripped the Vancouver housing market (here, here, here, here, here and many more) which has been over the past year, converted into the personal offshore piggybank of wealthy Chinese oligarchs seeking to park laundered money outside of their home nation. On the way, the story took an odd detour into the outright bizarre when we reported the curious story of the Chinese tycoon found “chopped up into 100 pieces” in a Vancouver mansion.
But nothing compares to this fascinating story reported first by the South China Morning Post, in which the paper’s investigation revealed the obscure transactions behind a commercial real estate frenzy, including a two-hour stampede by investors desperate to pay C$60m for a site valued at C$16m. Then, a month after taking ownership, they resold it for C$68m.
Presenting, the inside story of Vancouver’s wildest property deal, gone in 7,200 seconds
Julia Lau (inset) boasted on social media that the October sale of C$60 million
worth of shares in 1059 and 1075 Nelson Street (main picture) in Vancouver
had been sold out to investors in “7,200 seconds”.
It was in fall last year that Bruno and Peter Wall received an offer too good to refuse.
The prominent Vancouver property developers behind Wall Financial Corporation had spent C$16.8 million (HK$102 million) to buy two ageing walk-up apartment blocks on adjacent lots on Nelson Street in 2013. They had big plans for the downtown site: a glittering 60-storey residential skyscraper, taking advantage of the location within the city’s West End Community Plan, where a building could rise 168 metres tall under new zoning. The project was dubbed “Nelson on the Park” and the Walls turned to favourite designer Chris Doray to come up with what they hoped would be a new Vancouver landmark.
But now a consortium of investors was proposing something even more remarkable.
They would pay the Walls C$60 million for the site alone, which had just been valued at C$15.6 million by BC Assessment. The huge profit was impossible to resist, and the sale was completed in late January.
Doray, a 25-year veteran of the Vancouver development scene whose design has now been shelved, said he was “astonished” by the transaction, which he said set a new benchmark for commercial real estate in the city.
“The price on this block of land has now thrown everybody in the industry out of whack,” said Doray. “The property is worth, what, C$20 million, and somebody pays C$60million? One wonders what’s going on. Is this New York? Is this Hong Kong?”
1059 Nelson Street in downtown Vancouver, where property developers
Bruno and Peter Wall had once hoped to build a 60-story skyscraper.
The scale of the purchase, orchestrated by Sun Commercial Real Estate (Suncom) – a firm that specialises in pooling wealthy investors from Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant community – was …read more
