BCBusiness

16 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M AY 2 0 24 by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a longtime Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation. entire traditional base about what's up.) But what do they mean, these offers that range from the beer (worth maybe $6,000 for the more dedicated drink ers?) to values of $100,000 and various points in between? Are they really a good deal? Or is this the equivalent of those fake sales when you discover that the original price under the sale sticker is the same as the allegedly discounted one? People in the development industry, along with real estate agents, say it can go either way. The offer may indeed be a real discount, as a developer is trying to push through to the number of units needed to reach a financing milestone. They'll offer some kind of incentive for the last few to reach their magic 65 percent of units presold or whatever level is needed to unlock the next round of loan money. And, almost always, they'll try to offer any incentive that A free business-class trip to Japan worth $20,888 with that condo! A year's worth of beer with your future Sur rey townhouse! A decorating budget of $38,000 for that Richmond apartment! A 3.88percent mortgage rate for a suite in one of the region's most expensive developments, Oakridge Park! That's the kind of adver tising that has flooded my Facebook feed recently, thanks to me having whispered the words "presale condo" within a kilometre of my open laptop (or at least I think this is how it worked), disrupting the other wise steady flow of iceskating and crochetpattern videos, mixed in with updates from my actual friends occasionally. Although I have no inten tion of buying a presale condo, it's been quite the expedition into a new world of a Black Fridaystyle "LIMITED TIME OFFER BUY NOW OR ELSE" kind of advertising normally reserved for electron ics or purses, now applied to purchases of a million or more. And there have already been a lot of them this year. It was Polygon with the Japan trips, Concord Pacific with the decorating allowance, Century Group with the beer, not to mention a couple dozen others, too. The industry always goes into high gear around Lunar New Year, which is seen as a prime time to market to visiting Asian tourists and the leadin to one of the tradition ally busiest housebuying pe riods of the year. But the sales pitches achieved a new critical mass this year as marketers struggle to move product at a time when potential buyers are facing the highest interest rates in two decades. "It's a crazy business right now to be selling presales," says Ian Watt, a realtor who mostly specializes in resales. Interestingly, these are not ads that you will ever see out in the general public. They don't appear on development companies' websites or of ficial Facebook posts, for the most part. Certainly not on billboards. They're targeted ads, designed to cast a net over potential new buyers without alerting old buyers that some one is about to get a better deal than they did when they put their deposits down some time over the last few years. (It's a technique that apparently political parties also use to get out a message to a particular subgroup without alerting the PERKING UP SOME INTEREST With the current high mortgage rates, premium condo developers have started making things interesting for buyers L A N D V A L U E S

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