With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
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JULY/AUGUST 2017 BCBUSINESS 45 COURTESY B+B SCALE MODELS Back in Vancouver, Concord Pacic has built 57 highrises on the 208-acre Expo site, with 13 to 15 more planned, says senior vice-president of sales Grant Murray. Since acquiring a tract of land east of the CN Tower in 1998, the com- pany led by Terry Hui is also on its 35th tower in Toronto's CityPlace. And in its rst foreign project, Concord has teamed up with Toronto-based Brookeld O'ce Properties and the U.K.'s W1 Develop- ments Ltd. to build a 50-storey residential tower with some 310 suites in East Lon- don's gentrifying Shoreditch district. The Principal Tower will open in about two and a half years, says Murray, who adds that Concord has bought another Lon- don property. "We're very keen on hav- ing a presence in London and getting our name well known there as well as Asia." Concert Properties Ltd. hasn't ven- tured abroad, but it works in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. The com- pany, which has 225 employees and started out building rental apartments in Vancouver in 1989, went into Ontario in 2001, says president and CEO Brian McCauley. Concert has since built about 2,400 rental housing units in Toronto. B.C. developers always had to com- pete with seasoned rivals in their own backyard, says McCauley, whose com- pany is directly owned by 19 Canadian pension plans. "We learned very quickly that if we wanted to acquire sites in Vancouver proper or in Metro Vancouver, we had to sharpen our pencil, put our best foot forward and be aggressive." Seeing opportunities that local developers in other cities don't—and being prepared to take risks—has been another advantage, McCauley maintains. "I know that was the case when Concert came into the Toronto market back in 2001," he says. "No one was building purpose-built residential in Toronto and hadn't been doing it for a dozen years or more." Westbank's žirst development out- side B.C. was Azure, a luxury Dallas highrise that opened in 1998. For one of three Seattle projects, the company is planning to turn a Belltown parking lot at 3rd Avenue and Virginia Street into 500 apartments atop 100,000 square feet of o'ce space. "If I had to buy that site today, as an example, I'd be bidding against all Canadian guys," founder Gillespie says. "There would not be one developer from Seattle." Why not? First, the Canadian and U.S. banking systems are very di¢erent, Gillespie explains. Westbank's rst Seat- tle project is with a Canadian lender that will take a $350-million loan. "There's no American lender that could put a $350-million loan on their books," Gillespie says. "You'd have to stick six American lenders in that deal." The U.S. has thousands of banks, but seven rms dominate in Canada. "Those seven have built up a really strong exper- tise in real estate lending," Gillespie says. "You go talk to real estate lenders at American banks and Canadian banks, the Canadian bank lenders would run circles around them." The second reason is that many U.S. developers got wiped out in the Great 1.888.461.SHOW (7469) @showkraftps showkraftps.com With more than 20 years experience, we're the oldest new game in town. SMALL WORLD B+B Scale Models' rendering of the Anaha tower in Honolulu for U.S. developer Howard Hughes Corp.