Oh, looky! The Vancouver Olympic Village is in the news again, with the condo-king talking about the challenge of selling these units.
The troubled Olympic village will be back on the market Feb. 12, on the one-year anniversary of the 2010 Winter Olympics, with significant price reductions.
Marketing specialist Bob Rennie said Monday in an interview he will begin to market about 150 units in two to three waterfront buildings, including the signature Building 4 on the waterfront that housed the Canadian Olympic team.
In what he said has become a “do-right or die” effort, Rennie believes the village has only one last opportunity to be successfully marketed if it is to escape its vexing image as a troubled neighbourhood.
“The word ‘Olympic’ is a really, really expensive word,” he said. “It is wrought with controversy. It can be seen as a weakness. But it can also be seen as a strength.”
When someone gets into a taxi at the airport and says “take me to the Olympic village” everyone knows where that is, he said. It’s not the same when someone says the name of a residential building downtown.
A cab driver will know where Main and Hastings is too, but that doesn’t mean I want to live there. The 25% price cuts show up further down the article:
“Everything is now on the table. These will be price-competitive to what is out on the market,” he said.
While he wouldn’t talk specific prices, Rennie said that last May he test-marketed units in Building 4 at around $1,400 a square foot. They didn’t move. At a reduction of 25 per cent — a figure being raised speculatively in the real estate industry — the price would be just over $1,000 a square foot or about $1 million per unit.
How pissed off would you be if you were a presales buyer and they ended dropping the prices on remaining units by 25%?
