Are bloggers Public Enemy No.1 in an attack on the fundamentals?

Watching the news this week, you can  can see the real estate industry mounting their latest counter offensive to spin their message.

And that message will be... 'fundamentals don't matter'.

Despite having rejigged they way the benchmark price is calculated (twice this year, actually), the reality of the market is becoming hard to ignore.

Sales in May for all forms of housing across the Multiple Listing Service were down over 15.5% from last year, and the lowest for the month of May since 2001. For detached homes sales, the news is  even worse: They were down 25% for the same period last year.

While sales have fallen, the number of listings has risen. In the Vancouver westside, which is held up as the main beachhead for the Asian invasion, the total of active listings — those homes for sale that haven’t sold — has risen to 1,100 properties at present from 600 a year ago.

The pathetic attempts to neutralize the impact of these figures prompted Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin recently to state the obvious:

Commenting on these numbers, the resolutely sunny Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver decided this was “indicative of balanced market conditions.” But then the board would have viewed the crash of the Hindenburg as the result of “normal deflationary conditions.”

Yesterday we drew your attention to one of the latest piece by Global TV (Global reports the facts, concludes ours is now a 'depressed market', but then claims we're 'different').

 Global has also been unable to ignore the obvious:

Vancouver Real Estate had defied trends and showed steady growth for far longer than anybody believed possible. The evidence is not in the polls, which very often contradict one another, but on the ground, in the neighbourhoods where plum properties have always sold quickly and at a profit. Sellers are finding the days of multiple, over-asking offers have disappeared... and buyers are getting the pick of the crop with buyer reduced signs popping up all over the place.

They were even forced to admit that Vancouver is now "a depressed market".

So if the spin no longer works and the ugly numbers cannot be ignored, what do you do?

Invalidate the usefulness of the numbers, of course.

You could see the strategy launched when Bob Rennie spoke to the Urban Development Institute on May 17, 2012. Rennie said:

I joked with the CHMC’s board a couple of years ago, that the Vancouver market never went up on fundamentals, so why would we go down on fundamentals.  

However, our market really does have fundamentals but our fundamentals cannot be captured in a 90 second elevator conversation, at the water cooler, in a sound bite, and especially not on a blog or 140 character tweet.

And what are those fundamentals that cannot be captured in a 90 second conversation?

I think we saw that in the Global TV piece yesterday as well.

The spin we are going to see is the same as we have heard over and over before. "Rich people wanna live here.  We have limited area due to the mountains and the ocean.  And we have the scenic and lifestyle advantages of those same mountains and ocean." 

This is basically what Global TV said when they trotted out Tsur Sommerville:

Sommerville: Now we have a situation where prices aren't rising, they're flat. We have a situation were listing are rising, sales are falling and there isn't any of the kind of angst or anxiety out there in the marketplace. Instead what it's replaced with is less worries about people driving prices up and more worries about Greece blowing up the world economy.

Global Reporter: Vancouver is that market that is way different than any other kind of market.

Sommerville: Vancouver is very hard to figure out because so much of the purchases are done by wealth. Either people immigrating with wealth or people receiving wealth from parents or relatives so the normal 'what are incomes doing and what are prices doing', that just doesn't work out here well.

Global Reporter: And that may explain that while there are price reductions, average selling prices just aren't going down. Unlike other depressed markets in the world, there's no pressure to sell. And with our geography, the mountains and the ocean, it's not likely to change.

I suspect this will be the theme for the foreseeable future.

Claim prices simply can't go down here.  Tell everyone that wealth wants to be here. And desperately try to convince you to "buy now or be priced out forever".

And to the one segment of the community that the industry can't influence the peddle this message - the blogosphere - Rennie summed up his frustration in that May 17th UDI speech:

I do have a huge concern over what Tracie McTavish, the president of our company calls, your “Keyboard Courage”, referring to what is becoming a dangerous and apparently acceptable practice which is, negative market commentary that is nothing but speculation.

Speculation made by spineless, signature‐less, individuals on a blog, on a blog that in most cases has less than 500 followers.

Then the next thing you know, the mainstream media picks up on the negative as fact and all of a sudden, it’s breaking news and our industry spends the next 6 months attempting to dispel the rumors and sound bites.

The dispelling of the "rumours and sound bites" of the basic market fundamentals (ie. the inescapable reality of the hard sales data) has begun.

And it would appear that in this attack on the fundamentals, the blogosphere is being cast as Public Enemy No.1.

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The smell of desperation?

Faithful readers will recall posts we made at the end of March about the Marine Gateway development in south Vancouver.

It garnered notoriety as the first pre-sale condo sellout in Vancouver in over six years... an odd occurrence considering the slowing market conditions.

Even stranger was the fact that media reports documented less than 150 people in line for the sellout of 415 units in four hours.

It prompted us to wonder aloud if the Marine Gateway development hadn't fallen prey to the common industry practice whereby the marketer responsible for hawking the development strikes a deal with realtors who want to be exclusive agents to sell in the complex.  These realtors often have to pick up 5 to 10% of those options each. Once the complex is finished and all the developers suites are sold, then these realtors can sell theirs.

It means that these exclusive agents could actually be responsible for buying up to half of the pre-sales condos made available to the general public.

Did this occur at Marine Gateway? 

Is this how an estimated 130 people in line triggered a sell out of 415 units in a record four hours? Was it because these exclusive real estate agents secured half of the units (and the best ones at that... those which came with some of the limited parking spots and are the best candidates for future resale)?

Is this why, as noted on Global TV, those buyers who did actually line up early were disappointed they could only secure 1 bedroom condo units, units that were part of the contingent that came without an available parking spot?

The Marine Gateway sellout generated much needed R/E hype for the 'developments on rapid transit line' theme.

As we noted, Rennie Marketing Systems was launching a whole new theme which shifted the mantra of "location, location, location" to one of "transportation, transportation, transportation."

We observed that in the months ahead, Rennie would be expanding on this theme as he went to market with 3 more developments along the rapid transit system:

• A pre-sale of 300 units he will launched next month at another Canada Line Station - Brighouse Station in Richmond,
• a pre-sale of 230 units he will launch in September at Coquitlam Centre on the new Evergreen Line line .
• And a month after that 1,100 units, two towers, will go to market along the original Skytrain line in Vancouver at Joyce Road.

Well fast forward over a month.  

The first of those upcoming developments, the pre-sale of 300 units at another Canada Line Station - a development known as Mandarin Residences, has come and gone... with little fanfare.

According to the title page on their website (click on image to enlarge) only 203 of the 300 units pre-sold on opening weekend... a far cry from the instant sellout at Marine Gateway:

I wonder how many of those 203 'sold' units were assigned to the exclusive realtors at Mandarin Residences?

If half of the 300 units went to realtors (150 units), could it be that less than 50 units actually sold to buyer's/investors?

Is this why Global TV wasn't invited to cover that pre-sale?

I raise this question because if as few as only 50/300 units actually sold, then it would be desperation time with those 'exclusive realtors'.

And just how desperate might they be?

Would they be so desperate to as to beat the bushes of the internet to shill their condo in the comments section of a bear blog such as this one?

May I draw you attention to a comment made today as part of a recent Richmond post on this blog (click on image to enlarge):

The comment links to the website of the Mandarin Residences.

Normally I delete shill comments which link to this product or that one. But this one I'll leave up.

Take a wiff of it and remember the smell.

I'm pretty sure THAT's what desperation smells like.

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Poster Child - Updated 2

Last Saturday I posted aboutt the tsunami of condo pre-sales that are due to come onto the Greater Vancouver Real Estate market in the coming months.

Ozzie Jurock made reference to it on his Face Book page and described the spring/summer condo market as:

"a market that will have a lot of units for sale and more coming on stream."

In an OpEd piece in the Vancouver Sun, Jurock noted:

As of Feb. 29, 2012, there were 6,000-plus condos for sale through the Vancouver Real Estate Board - up 15% compared to the previous year.

At the same time, sales of used condos were down by 18%.

Add to this the fact that - according to MPC Intelligence - there are some 8,000 pre-sale condos being launched in the first six months of this year.

The battle for condo market sales is about to become very intense. And with 8,000 pre-sales coming on the market, a battle within a battle is sure to emerge.

Clearly the first shot was fired by condo king Bob Rennie with the launch of Marine Gateway last Saturday.

As we noted in Thursday's post, Rennie marketed the development around a whole new theme shifting the mantra of "location, location, location" to one of "transportation, transportation, transportation".

In the months ahead, he will be expanding on this theme as he goes to market with 3 more developments along the rapid transit system:

• A pre-sale of 300 units he will launch next month at another Canada Line Station - Brighouse Station in Richmond,
• a pre-sale of 230 units he will launch in September at Coquitlam Centre on the new Evergreen Line line .
• And a month after that 1,100 units, two towers, will go to market along the original Skytrain line in Vancouver at Joyce Road.

The transportation theme is going to be part of a major marketing strategy weaved among a number of initiatives which attempt to put Rennie's clients at the forefront of the coming tsunami wave of product.

It's going to be a very,very tough market.

Compounding the challenge is all the negativity that has been prominent in the mainstream press recently.

• There have been countless 'housing bubble' stories in the press.
• Both the Bank of Canada and the Finance Minster continue to make bearish statements on debt, the real estate bubble and interest rates.
• The nation's biggest banks are openly calling on the Federal Government for tighter mortgage regulations.

And all this has contributed to several months of rapidly declining real estate sales.  Let's face it, who wants to catch a falling knife?  Especially when everyone seems to be saying that very sharp knife is going to fall.

That's why we cast a suspicious eye on the sell out of Marine Gateway in four hours on Saturday.

Witness who were there have commented on other blogs that there were only about 110-130 people lined up for pre-sales (Global TV covered the sale saying it was less than 150). Yet all 415 units sold out?

Given the shenanigans we have seen from the real estate industry over the past year, things like:

• realtors snapping up pre-sales to market later,
• development marketers hiring people to stand in line, creating a 'buzz' for a pre-sale,
• staged helicopter tours supposedly flying wealthy Asian buyers around new projects,
• and realtors bringing in 'surprise' competing parties just before a couple is about to make an offer on a house (thereby pressuring them to act right away) - just to name a few.

... it makes you wonder about the legitimacy of the supposed 'sell out' of pre-sale contracts at Marine Gateway.

Not to suggest there's anything illegal happening here.  No doubt all the units are contractually spoken for.  

But how many went to realtors whom had inside connections and how many were sold to actual buyers/speculators? How many units were going to go unsold on Saturday but were suddenly "spoken" for?

Perhaps those 415 presales (options to purchase) weren't all actually available for sale.

It's my understanding that most lenders will ask that 40 to 60% of the condominiums in a development have an option to purchase before the bank will fund the project. I am told it is common practice to strike a deal with realtors that, if they want to be an exclusive agent to sell in the complex, they have to pick up 5 to 10% of those options each. Once the complex is finished and all the developers suites are sold, then you can sell yours. It means that these  exclusive agents could buy half of the pre-sales at an offering themselves.

In this way if 130 people show up to buy, you could have a sell out because half of the pre-sales are sold to the exclusive agents. It's a sell out, but it's just pure theatre.

The stakes here were simply too high for anything but a sell out.

The huge marketing effect to be leveraged on the Rennie developments coming up later this year that would be bolstered by a record breaking sellout at Marine Gateway cannot be underestimated.

There hasn't been a sell-out of pre-sale condo unit offerings in Vancouver in over six years. You have to go back to the Woodward's presale in 2006 - before the collapse of the world financial markets - to match an opening day pre-sale sellout of a condo development.

With a 'the sell-out is back' tagline, what an opportunity to market the next three projects.

Marine Gateway can be held up to potential buyers of the next three rapid transit line projects and they can be told 'buy now before you are priced out forever'.

When you consider this, how many of you out there (if you have your own real estate development company) wouldn't snap up all 415 pre-sale contracts (and sell them over the next 3 years as Marine Gateway is constructed) as a spring board to launch 3 other developments in this type of intense competitive market?

Personally I think the events at Marine Gateway were just that... pure theatre.

Either way, one thing is certain.

Those speculators (and exclusive realtor agents) who snapped up these units will either profit immensely or founder badly on this effort. A huge gamble is being taken here.

As Ozzie Jurock noted on the weekend in the Vancouver Sun,

"many made a lot of money by 'flipping' pre-sale contracts in the past, but the rules and risks are much different now."

Ozzie's right.  The rules and risks have indeed changed. And if the restrictive mortgage regulations proposed by the OSFI are implimented, the game will change even more dramatically.

If that happens Marine Gateway could well become the Lower Mainland's speculative Waterloo.

Time will tell.

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What's wrong with this picture?

Let me ask you... what's wrong with the picture above?  

Click on it to enlarge and take a look at it for a minute.  

The picture was taken this morning and captures the corner of Cambie and Marine in Vancouver - site of this week's hottest Real Estate topic; the four hour sell-out of the development known as Marine Gateway.

In case you aren't aware of what went on, Global TV provides this synopsis:

Marine Gateway, and the 415 pre-sale units that sold, is big news because at a time when listings are soaring and sales have been falling off a cliff, the pre-sales at this development have bucked the negative trend.

In fact it has completely turned that trend on it's head.

Hmmm.

Let's put that into perspective.

A sell-out of pre-sale condo unit offerings hasn't happened in Vancouver in over six years.  As Global TV noted in this story, you have to go back to the Woodward's presale in 2006 - before the collapse of the world financial markets - to match an opening day pre-sale sellout of a condo development.

And Marine Gateway sold out even faster than that Woodward's development.  

Woodwards (with similar prices) took 12 hours to sell 536 units.

At Marine Gateway people started lining up last Thursday. And as the lineups began, news spread that over 11,000 people had pre-registered for this development.

But by Saturday morning only about 100 - 150 people had actually lined up (one commenter over at Vancouver Condo Info pegged the number at only 106).

So 106 people bought over 400 units?

Hmmm.

Interestingly when you watch the Global clip, one buyer laments she was only able to secure a 1 bedroom condo (without an available parking spot at that). How come? Did she come late and miss out?

No... she stresses she showed up on time.

Even more curious is the fact that Global didn't find anyone to talk to that walked away empty handed.

Hmmm.

One can't help but observe that this was a very carefully planned and prepared offering.  As the Global story notes, Rennie Marketing Systems had a lot at stake here.

Checking craigslist in the week before the offering, the infamous Condo King wasn't leaving much to chance.  There was clearly significant marketing and networking done prior to the sale.  

As you can see by these ads (click to enlarge), other realtors were already on board offering the units to customers in advance of the Saturday opening. They were even offering to rebate 20% of their commission to get you on board early:

A lot of preparation went into trying to make this pre-sale a one day success.

Watching the Global TV clip you quickly notice the emphasis being placed on promoting the key feature of Marine Gateway: it's location on the Canada Line. Rennie bends over backwards to replace the R/E mantra of "location, location, location" with the new mantra of "transportation, transportation, transportation."

It's a theme I suspect we will see a lot of in the coming months.

In fact, a few days after the Global piece above aired, we are treated to another treatise emphasizing the "transportation, transportation, transportation" mantra:

And it's in this latest piece we get a glimpse of a wider issue at play here.  

Apparently Bob Rennie has 3 other developments about to go to market along transportation lines. 

• Next month Rennie will pre-sale of 300 units at another Canada Line Station - Brighouse Station in Richmond.
• In September he will launch 230 units at Coquitlam Centre where the new Evergreen Line line will be opening.
• And a month after that 1,100 units, two towers, will go to market along the original Skytrain line in Vancouver at Joyce Road.

Can you imagine how crippling a flop in sales last Saturday could have been? Failure to sell out at Marine Gateway would have been devastating.

I wonder how disappointed Rennie Marketing was when only 106 people showed up in the sales line up by Saturday morning?

But Marine Gateway didn't flop.

Instead we were witness to  THE MOST SUCCESSFUL pre-sale launch in Vancouver history, a perfect event for what is touted as the cutting edge model of what's crucial to real estate sales in the modern city.

All accomplished in the midst of a market which has been screaming negativity week after week from the likes of the mainstream press with their talk of a housing bubble ready to burst.

Amidst negative statements on debt and the real estate bubble from the Governor of the Bank of Canada and similar statements from the Federal Finance Minster.

Amidst warnings from the heads of some of the nation's biggest banks on the threat of a bursting housing bubble.

And all framed by several months of negativity of actual sales results released over the past few months.

Hmmm.

I can't help but think of all the shenanigans we have seen over the last few years.

I think they call it 'staging'.

You know what I'm referring to.... development marketers hiring people to stand in line, creating a 'buzz' for a pre-sale. Staged helicopter tours supposedly flying wealthy Asian buyers around proposed new developments. Realtors bringing in 'surprise' competing parties just before a couple is about to make an offer on a house (thereby pressuring you to act right away).

All done in the name of 'staging' the right 'optics'.

So what are the optics created by Marine Gateway?

Would it be wrong to cast such a suspicious eye on a record breaking sellout anomaly that occurs at time when other realtors are openly talking about how dead the market has been so far this year? When only 1% of the registered people interested in the development actually show up on sales day?

Hmmm.

Which brings us back to the picture at the top of this post.

As I said, it was taken this morning... a full five days after what has been a supposed record breaking pre-sale sellout in a dead market wherein only about 106 people lined up and created a 415 unit sellout of a development which will be a springboard for a host of new developments with a "transportation, transportation, transportation" theme.

That picture is conspicuous for what is NOT there.

Let me ask you... when was the last time you saw a developer sell out an offering and not promote the crap out of that success with "SOLD OUT" banners plastered across every conceivable sign posted on the property?

It's been five days and there is nary a single 'sold out' sticker anywhere.

I could understand the day of, or maybe even no stickers until after the weekend was over... but nothing a full five days afterward?

Especially when this is the first of several developments being launched along the transportation network by the same promoter this year.

Perhaps they're waiting until after Cam Good's helicopter makes a fly by?

Hmmm.

(Note: follow up post available here)

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Wed Post #2: Another R/E Bubble Warning

We last heard from Capital Economics (CE) back in June 2011.

 They are an economic think tank founded in 1999 to provide "independent macro economic research in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and the UK, on the property sector", had concluded that Canada's housing market was in a bubble that's set to burst.

They say housing prices could plunge by as much as 25%.

• “Housing valuations have lost all touch with fundamentals and household debt is at a record high. Canadian house prices are overvalued at close to the excessive levels seen in the frothy U.S. market at its 2006 peak.”

Two months later the group continues to pump the same message.  The Globe and Mail put out an interesting chart on Monday by the group which shows 'house price to income per capita'. As you can see we are nearing the same levels the Americans had just before their crash took hold (click to enlarge):

CE notes that our current boom has produced the largest increase ever seen in Canadian housing prices and has wrenched real estate out of its usual alignment to people’s income and concludes that all signs increasingly point to a housing bubble.

“The stories we hear about people buying homes to rent out as investment properties, and others buying homes fearing that if they wait they will be priced out of the market, only convince us even more,” CE's David Madani (pictured above) writes in a research note.

Madani restates the same concerns as those articulated in June.  Mass psychology – “animal spirits” – have driven housing prices to unsustainable levels and that it can only lead to a collapse of at least 25% over the next few years.

In the short term, Mr. Madani sees any further gains as modest. “Housing affordability is already stretched, with costs accounting for a very large share of household income, over 40 per cent according to some estimates.”

Olympic Village - Millennium Water

Speaking of bubbles and a declining market, have you seen the latest bit of promotional desperation over at the former Olympic Village (now Millennium Water)?

Our friends over at Vancouver Condo Info are reporting today on the latest from the sales team team at Rennie Marketing,

The website hails: "We’re kicking off a brand new promotion tomorrow—an amazing move-in package of essentials for every buyer—it’s everything you’ll need for life at The Village!"

And almost as if you are watching a Ron Popeil commerical, the list of goodies carries on missing only Popeil's trademark "but that's not all... you will also receive..."

The package includes:

• A hybrid bicycle – for your 5KM ride along the seawall to Stanley Park
• A portable BBQ – for Saturday’s BBQ with the in-law’s, on your balcony or at Hinge Park
• A one-year Aquabus ferry pass – for a last minute trip to Granville Island or Yaletown
• A single person kayak – get to know the neighbourhood sea life
• A year’s worth of one-zone Translink FareCards – the skytrain is only 5 minutes away
• A coffee per day for a year at Terra Breads Café – just downstairs
• A pair of running shoes – run the seawall in style
• A year’s worth of groceries from Urban Fare – an elevator ride away
• A year’s membership to Modo Car Co-op – for your day trip to Seattle
• A set of All-Clad cookware – for your Miele kitchen

I wonder if Rennie could get Weird Al to redo his Popeil song for him?  "Now how much would you pay?"

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The Midas Touch?

Every year the springtime rain engulfs Vancouver in its infamous mist. But this year it isn’t just the precipitation that is causing seasonal affective disorder amongst its residents.

This season the collapsing real estate market is making it’s own contribution.

And no one is battling the circadian rhythm imbalance more the local condo king, Bob Rennie.

Rennie, Vancouver’s 52-year-old condo wunderkind, has long been touted as having a golden touch when it comes to selling real estate. Reportedly selling of between $1.2-billion and $2-billion annually, his Rennie Marketing Systems (RMS) promotes itself as helping to create the fastest-growing residential downtown in North America.


So effective was RMS that, as successes mounted in the 1990s, Rennie expanded his job description — from realtor to marketer to developer’s consultant to city builder.

Rennie has gone from just selling what developers gave him, to telling those developers what to build.

In an April 2008 article in Real Estate Vancouver, Rennie is reported to have been so involved with the ultra luxury Ritz-Carlton development that he redrew floor plans for the penthouse. “For that price, people want more room, not more rooms,” Rennie instructed designers MCM, “and a separate entrance for the nanny suite.”

The same article noted that Rennie also “coaches his clients—more comfortable in the black-and-white environs of bankers’ boardrooms and construction sites—on how to manage the nuanced realpolitik of Vancouver’s planning department.”

RMS balanced this boardroom power with tremendous media influence. As one of Vancouver’s biggest advertisers, the company reportedly buys more than 200 pages of ads annually in the Vancouver Sun alone - at $35,000 a page. That advertising manna is also spread around numerous other magazines and other media outlets.

Critics have wondered if the rise in such powerful development entities have been successful in manipulating the media, over-promoting the real estate bubble as genuine news and preying on gullible buyers in the process.

Publically Rennie has refuted such claims and maintained a bullish take on real estate in Vancouver as a win-win endeavour for everyone. As recently as April 2008, Rennie could see nothing but never-ending market expansion for Vancouver - despite the collapsing R/E wave that was sweeping across the rest of North America. Said Rennie, “To live in Vancouver and own Real Estate, you have won the lottery”.

Even as potentail lottery players lined up at his offerings, Rennie would taunt the sheep-herd mania fostering in the Vancouver bubble. Said Rennie of one pending development, “Great location, smaller suites. Put in a Sub-Zero fridge and a Wolf range with red knobs and they’ll line up to buy it.”

It is said that the bigger they are, the harder they fall and pundits now wonder if greed and arrogance are catching up to Rennie and RMS.

This week came the announcement that the flagship $500-million Ritz-Carlton hotel-condo development has been dealt a death blow as Rennie's client cancelled the entire development.

RMS had to have more than 75 units in Ritz-Carleton sold by the end of this month. With prices ranging from $1.4 million to $28 million, only 62 of the 123 condos in the Arthur Erickson-designed twisting tower sold. Without the requisite sales, the developer pulled the plug and 62 lottery players were left with a contract as worthless as last week's 6/49 ticket, private nanny-suite entrance notwithstanding.

Was the Ritz-Carleton pushing the limits on Vancouver’s obscene housing bubble with its prices?

The $28-million price tag for a 7,400-square-foot penthouse on the 59th and 60th floors of the tower was believed to be a record asking price for a Vancouver penthouse. That's $10 million more than the $18 million paid by a U.S. businessman for a 48th-floor penthouse in the Private Residences at Hotel Georgia, set to open in 2011.

With the smallest and lowest priced unit asking $1.4 million, many viewed the development as the epitome of the run-amok bubble mindset that has typified a real estate market gone mad.

For Rennie, it is the latest in a growing string of failures that includes the Hills, Jameson House and that 'development-on-government-life-support' - Millennium Water; aka the Olympic Village.

Other developments like Richards on Richards and the Woodwards project are reported to be languishing as well.

It's a far cry from October 2005 when Rennie told the Financial Post Business Magazine, “This isn't a bubble, it's going to go on and on. Vancouver is in a unique position. It makes sense to spend a lot of money on a condo here."

In 2009, as King Midas loses his golden touch, Rennie’s bellicose media quotes have disappeared almost as suddenly as his recent condo developments.

Besides disappearing from the media limelight, could it be that Rennie is the process of bailing out on Vancouver and its 'unique position' as well?

In a recently announced collaboration, RMS will be marketing a huge development on Vancouver Island with TimberWest.

At a news conference in Victoria, Rennie summed up the new development by saying, "It’s not about creating urban centres. It’s about creating real land and real uses for homeowners, whether that’s manufactured home parks or homesteading on one-acre or five-acre developments or farming; we’re going to look at real needs.”

Going to look at "real needs!"

As opposed to looking at what? The superfical, easily manipulated, 'needs' of the urban Vancouverite?

Maybe that can be the new neighbourhood slogan: Yaletown, home of the real estate patsies.

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Email: village_whisperer@live.ca