Yeah, our pricing estimate is probably a bit high, but after you put in an elevator, PMT and crazy high DCL / Permit fees it adds up.

In Vancouver? Your land / design / build / finance costs will be higher.
Probably $600psf for hard and soft costs, n/i land or finance costs (const loan and land mortgage)

Maybe I need to hire someone for this role… but first:

1. easy zoning first and foremost.

2. Finance will follow as it did with lane houses and multiplex.

3. need a non-speculative ownership structure that can qualify as equivalent to rental vis a vis fees, zoning and finance.

Vancity has good multiplex financing but I think it’s limited to 4 units.

Also CNV is now allowing deferral of 3/4 of DCL fees until completion (if I recall)

There's probably a role for a development manager / consultant if you wanted it to be replicable.

If it's 2 parties you can probably do a TIC for the land during development. If more then you'd probably set up a corporation with shares, where the corp buys the land from the existing owner, pays the design soft costs, and gets the construction loan. At completion you get separate mortgages.

yes... just a question of the permitting etc being predictable enough to offset the challenge / uncertainty of the unusual ownership.

We’ve seen some single family homes that are 5 yrs old get demo’d when the lot was upzoned.

This is one of the problems with pocket or corridor rezoning vs citywide incremental upzoning (where development naturally goes where more appropriate)

Vancouver is a young city overall but we still demo a lot of buildings because we have no greenfield space to sprawl into, and our single family zoning has suppressed densification while pumping land values to a point where existing buildings have almost no value relative to the land.

🌶️

The 3 storey update allows the ground floor to be built at-grade vs the previous rules that incentivized basements.

yes

Previously 2.5 storey houses were allowed everywhere.

Todd, TEAM, the Sun etc. never look at the downside of having pumped a @#$% ton of money into single family land values through decades of lax money policy combined with tight zoning policy.

yes, most lowrise housing here is wood framed.

This is the crux

bsky.app/profile/lane...

Yeah - I always love demeaning language for small homes.

More hand wringing from Douglas Todd at @vancouversun.bsky.social

No mention of the fact that the adjacent single family lot is probably valued at $2.5m. DT chooses to focus on aesthetic angst instead.

vancouversun.com/business/dou...

We’ve used all varieties. This job is using exterior mineral wool.