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It's Friday afternoon and a convoy of
sparkling sport-utes with Alberta plates, many
of them towing trailers and powerboats, is
squeezing through the ochre-coloured walls of
Sinclair Canyon at the western portal of
Kootenay National Park near Radium Hot Springs.
The fuel pumps are on constant rotation in
Radium on this sweltering summer weekend, the
last pit stop for Calgarians making the weekly
pilgrimage to their summer cottage on B.C.'s
Lake Windermere.
Andy Smith, a Kootenay Real
Estate Board director and a Remax realtor,
estimates that Albertans own nearly 50 percent
of the land in and around Radium, Invermere and
Fernie- longtime hotspots for Albertans on
holiday because the towns fall within that
critical three-hour driving radius from Calgary.
Things have changed. When you
consider the influence bulging Albertan
pocketbooks are having on B.C.'s already
sizzling real-estate market today, driving
distance is no longer a limiting factor.
Cash-flush Alberta baby bookers who first
discovered B.C. as a recreational destination
are now swarming to Vancouver Island in droves
with an eye to retirement. Thanks to a surging
oil-and-gas economy next door that shows no
signs of abating, the wave of real-estate
investment cresting over the Rockies is gaining
momentum. "Alberta is making all the money and
B.C. is becoming their playground," says Rudy
Nielsen, a ...developer whose real-estate
research firm Landcor Data Corp. monitors the
Alberta factor.
Examples abound. Rudy
Nielsen, through his Niho Land & Cattle Company,
plans to market five-acre oceanfront lots that
he owns in the rain-drenched remote northern tip
of Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes almost
exclusively to Albertans.
The wealth in Wild Rose
country is also being felt in the Comox Valley,
a place that not that long ago-before the
four-lane Inland Island Highway and the new
Comox airport terminal were built- was a little
known backwater, a locals-only Shangri-La of
good, small town living. The AB-factor is also
becoming a force in swanky, designer golfing
communities such as Bear Mountain, the exclusive
development a mere 20-minute drive from downtown
Victoria that's co-owned by former Calgary
Flames goaltender Mike Vernon, Rob Niedermayer
and a handful of other retired NHLers.
"The oil patch and
retiring
Albertans are certainly having an impact on the
provincial market," says Cameron Muir, a senior
analyst with Canada Mortgage and Housing
Corp.'s Vancouver office.
It's easy to understand why
Vancouver Island appeals to the aging and
moneyed Albertan: golf, lakes, ocean, ski hills,
spas, cappuccino cafes and vineyards. Though
some places on Vancouver Island have seen
property value increases in 2005 up to 20
per cent, real estate on the Island is still
considered by many analysts to be a bargain,
largely undervalued by North American standards.
If you ask your average
executive facing retirement from the Alberta oil
patch what the future holds in his or her
twilight years, shoveling snow and shuffling
outside in a winter parka to plug in the block
heater don't top the list. Try tuning up your
golf game 12 months a year and soaking in a
coastal climate the envy of Canada, where green
thumbed retirees can grow cantaloupes if they so
choose. Add to the fact that B.C. is being
governed by a second-term Liberal regime that
resembles the Alberta Conservatives more than
any other political machine to have marched
across the province's chaotic political
landscape, and you can understand why lifestyle
pilgrims from east of the Rockies now feel
comfortable, politically and socially, on the
"left coast".
While one Albertan
slips into his flip-flops and sips a cocktail on
his deck overlooking Lake Windermere, a
woman in smart business attire steps onto the
tarmac at YQQ. Two years ago the Comox Valley
airport moved from its claustrophobic,
unremarkable trailer park digs to a sparkling
new, upbeat terminal that seemed to signal the
arrival of a refreshing, open-door attitude for
this island community. From Cow Town, via a
direct WestJet flight, it's a mere one hour hop
to the Comox Valley. Safely on solid ground, the
well-dressed woman collects her attache, steps
outside into the Comox Valley summer sunshine
and is greeted by an eager realtor who
leads her to a pristine black Lexus. Another
so-called amenity migrant arrives to stake a
claim on Vancouver Island.
Clearly, times are good these
days for realtors in this increasingly
trendy community of 65,000 (considering the
Comox Valley includes Comox, Cumberland,
Courtenay and the surrounding rural areas). The
depressing housing slump that characterized the
mid-1990's and sent part time realtors packing
by the busloads and scuttling for new
occupations seems like a distant bad memory. The
market is on fire. It's burning so hot that
between 2004 and 2005 alone, housing prices
surged on average 19 per cent. The days of the
$100,000 fixer-upper are long gone, with entry
level homes on city lots hard to find for less
than twice that much.
In its latest buyer
profile, the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board
(VIREO) estimates that Albertans represent 12
per cent of buyers in its region, which includes
the entire Island north of Victoria. It's a
number realtors expect will continue to grow.
"Sometimes they don't care what they buy. They
just want to get into the market to keep up with
inflation, then, when they retire and move out
here they can sell and buy what they want," says
Darrell Paysen, VIREO president and an agent
based out of Duncan with Sutton Realty. "When I
look out the window I think 'why wouldn't you
want to live here?'"
It's a rather tired mantra
that lifestyle-smug Vancouver Islanders used to
utter conspiratorially over beers to an audience
of nobody. That was before the place was
discovered. Now the Island is booming, but not
because of any profound economic development or
diversification; rather, it's being fuelled
partly by people who make the money elsewhere-
like the Alberta oil patch- and move here to
spend it happily in their retirement.
Even cocky and confident
Albertans admit their province can't offer what
B.C. can in terms of lifestyle options. Most of
our neighbour's scenic mountain scenery is sewn
up by Jasper, Banff and Waterton Lakes national
parks, as well as Kananaskis Country on
the eastern slope of the Rockies where
development is severely, if not completely,
restricted.
Developable land in Alberta
resort hamlets like Canmore next to national
parks is drying up. Conversely, John Sparrow, a
Calgary-based realtor, looks at B.C. as a
paradise of lakefront, mountain and oceanfront
property awaiting the arrival of equity-rich
Albertans. "Let's face it, not a lot of
Albertans are looking at the prairies in
Saskatchewan for resort properties," says
Sparrow.
The blueprint for
accommodating a wave of retirees and lifestyle
pilgrims on Vancouver Island was set in motion
years ago with an infrastructure
development plan to render the Island a less
isolated place than it had been in the past. For
starters, the four-lane, $1.2 billion Inland
Island Highway was completed in the late '90's
and allows drivers to bypass the serpentine and
slow coastal route, reducing the trip from
Victoria to the Comox Valley from five hours to
less than three. Along the route a phalanx of
billboards continually touts the
retirement-friendly attributes of Vancouver
Island. "Fairwinds: Live Here, Live More," and
"Bear Mountain: Your course. Your resort. Your
home. Or all of the above." Adding to its
prestige, Vancouver Island's international
profile has grown substantially thanks to
gushing profiles in glossy travel publications
like Conde Nast Traveller and Travel &
Leisure.
Albertans are part of a
growing cavalry of Island real estate
conquistadors, and WestJet has provided the
horsepower to get them to the market
battlefield. Comox Airport handled 210,000
passengers in 2005, a three-fold increase from
when WestJet first announced flights to Comox in
2000. Today, Albertans account for 13 per
cent of airport traffic, or 27,300 passengers
annually.
On the outskirts of Victoria,
a similar story is playing out. Last November,
the champagne corks were flying at Bear Mountain
Golf Resort Properties when, at the end of a
single day of feverish selling, the developers
tallied $140 million in premium condo sales,
destroying the previous one-day record for the
entire Greater Victoria Region. The sales binge
also more than doubled Victoria's monthly record
of $66 million racked up last spring. Of the
more than 270 condos ranging in price from
$205,000 to $949,000 that sold on that
legendary November 14, Albertans represented 30
per cent of the buyers.
They're coming for the golf,
good weather, an exclusive, well-designed
concept and, believe it or not, good prices.
"Albertans are way less price-sensitive than
Vancouver Island or Victoria buyers. We always
thought of ourselves as a Whistler kind of place
in that not many people who live there are from
there," says Dale Sproule, Bear Mountain's
director of real estate. "With the way the
economy is moving in Alberta, we expect it to
continue to be a strong market."
The developers are just
one-fifth into completing their master plan,
which at build-out will see 1,000 single family
homes, 1,800 condos, 300 townhomes as well as
two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses and
140,000 square feet of retail space crowding the
1,200 acre property that sprawls across Bear
Mountain.
Sproule is so bullish on the
Alberta market, that within the year, Bear
Mountain plans to hang shingles in Wild Rose
country and open a sales office in Calgary, and
perhaps a second in Edmonton. And in a departure
from its in-house development model, Bear
Mountain has parceled out a chunk of raw land
and sold it to Alberta-based Cove Properties-
the first time it has outsourced a piece of Bear
Mountain turf to another company for
development.
"We were very interested in
Victoria and wanted a property that commanded
top-of -market value," John Sparrow, Cove's VP
of sales and marketing told BC Business
over the phone from his Calgary office. Cove
hopes to break ground this fall on a 20-storey
glass and concrete tower with 200 condos in the
$500,000 to $1 million price range. Residents
will be able to tone up in the private indoor
aquatic and fitness centre and sip
wheat-grass and carrot juice cocktails from the
bar overlooking the 9th and 10th tees.
This is the second time that
Cove has cast its eye and resources west over
the Rocky Mountains into B.C. Its Playa del Sol
property near Gyro Beach in Kelowna is 90 per
cent sold out to a largely Calgarian and
Edmontonian clientele, apparently breaking that
three hour maxim (Kelowna is roughly six hours
from Calgary).
"There are a lot of wealthy
people in Alberta and an aging demographic with
a propensity to purchase resort properties,"
Sparrow says. "B.C. is a natural place for
Albertans to look to spend recreational time and
recreational money."
Apparently so. |
