There’s a new resort destination – it’s 20 minutes from downtown Vancouver and for less than half a million dollars, you get a two-bedroom, 1,100 square foot apartment with a waterfront view.
It’s the Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo, which has turned from a worn out and empty mill town into the kind of cozy seaside city where restaurants are housed in heritage buildings and the ocean views are about as spectacular as it gets on the West Coast. In other words, it’s close to becoming a resort town, where Vancouverites in search of affordable waterfront property can go for a weekend getaway.
Dwayne Yaretz, who lives in Yaletown, bought a 1,250 square foot waterfront apartment at the Pacifica in Nanaimo back in 2005 for less than $500,000. He uses the two-bedroom property as a weekend getaway, accessible by a 20-minute seaplane flight, steps from his downtown office.
“That same property in Coal Harbour would easily cost $1,000 a square foot,” says Mr. Yaretz, who works in corporate finance. “My investment would be $1.2- or $1.4-million for a similar view. Quite frankly, the waterfront view from Pacifica is just as nice.”
When Pacifica developer Bill Wright realized that a big chunk of the demographic buying into his project was the 40-something getaway-for-the-weekend crowd, he kicked into action. In order to sell the remaining 30 or so units of the 18-storey, 143-apartment, 26-town home complex, he is offering free flights from Vancouver on Harbour Air, with one return a week, adding up to about 88 flights. Considering a round trip is about $150 from downtown Vancouver, it’s the perfect incentive for urban buyers. Another incentive is the price – a two-bedroom unit that’s more than 1,000 square feet starts at around $440,000. The penthouse is priced at $760,000. In Vancouver, prices for comparable properties would be in the seven digits.
Pacifica has single-handedly changed the Nanaimo waterfront. It sits on the site of a former eyesore, a half-complete concrete shell of an office building that had lost its financial footing and languished for more than a decade. For a couple of years, there was a plan for a hotel and conference centre. And then, in 2005, Cape Development stepped in.
“If you can imagine, for about 10 years they had this edifice on their doorstep, which is the gateway to Nanaimo and it looked like something in Beirut. It did not look nice,” says Mr. Wright. “I remember looking at brochures of downtown Nanaimo and they had erased this structure out of all the pictures. I thought, ‘I would, too.’ ”
In order to work with a half complete structure, preserving the parking spaces and adding on 10 more floors, the developers undertook what is considered one of the largest building renovations ever in Canada. The result is a massive 212,000 square foot condo and townhouse development – a monument to the golden era in real estate in which it was built five years ago. Back then, there was hot demand for a luxury tower.
“In terms of financial success, if maybe we didn’t go as high as we did, it may have been better,” says Mr. Wright. “We would have finished sooner. Because we added additional floors onto the structure, it took an enormous amount of time and cost.”
Corry Hostetter, general manager for the Downtown Nanaimo Business Improvement Association, says that if downtown was to truly revitalize, that pivotal site had to be revitalized, too.
“It’s played an extremely large part in the revitalization of Nanaimo,” she says. “I’ve been in Nanaimo for 22 years, and for all that time it had been an empty building.”
Downtown Nanaimo is a small but scenic heritage neighbourhood that was a quaint seaside community until big box retail came to town. Many of the businesses moved to the outlying malls at the north end of the city, where people did their shopping by car instead of on foot. With the major department stores and many of the mom and pop shops gone, and with little residential development in the core, it became a neglected ghost town. For several years, the City of Nanaimo has been offering incentives to revitalize the economy of the downtown core, and it’s worked. There is the new Vancouver Island Conference Centre, restaurants in heritage buildings, a four-kilometre seawall, boutique stores moving in, and tourists and locals walking around the streets.
