Quote:
Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
Yeah, and yet there’s talk in another thread that some of the Dartmouth residential towers might not get built as planned, in the event of a rental slowdown, because god help us if our vacancy rate were to rise and the average cost of rentals might have to sink back to sane levels.
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It has been like this in Vancouver for years. A few developers control a lot of key sites, like old shopping malls, and they announce huge housing plans but then phase the construction over a long time, carefully maximizing the sale prices. If there's any whiff of a downturn they get cold feet. There isn't actually any shortage of developable highrise land and there's still core land that's been "banked" since the 80s which could have had people living there for decades.
It seems like an unhealthy environment where there's a cartel of builders, a lot of presale speculation and very high taxes/fees as well as construction costs. To break this I think we'd need a lot of work done around all these factors. Development fees largely cut, problems with materials and labour costs improved, and governments pushing for construction even in a downturn through mechanisms like CMHC taking over or backstopping projects. Some of this has happened but I'm not sure that enough has.
It has worked out great for generating $$$$ for some people though.
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