Thurs Post #1: 2290 Saxony Court: the latest fake mansion picture poster child

Yesterday we highlighted the barrage of news stories promoting the upcoming auction of 2290 Saxony Court in Mississauga, Ontario.

Languishing on the market since it was constructed, the builder has turned to an auction to hawk the home that originally carried an $11 million price tag.

As part of the hype, in which Richie Brothers outwardly admit they hope a lower price will trigger a bidding war, the $5.5 million opening bid is promoted as half price.

Our interest in the property was piqued when a reader in this online Windsor newspaper story noted something was amiss. 

The comment says, "the front of the property has been Photoshoped; the sidewalk and curb are where the pillars and fence are. There is no more setback to this monstrosity than there is to a bungalow on Bloor. I hope no one is bidding online based on those pictures. Unless there is a disclaimer along with the description and photos of this place it constitutes fraud."

Really?

The main nighttime entrance photo above is featured prominently in photo gallery for the house. As is this daytime photo:

There's also this 3D rendering of the overall property:

Look at the wide, sweeping driveway.  Look at that lush, huge front yard.

Wow.

The builder, Ambassador Fine Custom Homes, has a masthead on their website that proudly proclaims: "Building Trust."

When you see the interior pictures, images of caviar wishes and champagne dreams abound.

All of which is surely designed to catch the eye of intending international buyer (a Ritchie Bros spokesman outwardly admit their market here is beyond the Mississauga area - probably overseas).

But take a closer look at this 'house' via google street view. Because when you do, Ambassador's slogan of 'building trust' suddenly takes a vicious beating:

As you can see 2290 Saxony Court isn't some wide open country estate, it's a large house squeezed into an end-of-cul-de-sac residential property (click on all images to enlarge).

Umm… what the hell happened to the sprawling front yard? Back to the 3D rendering, check out the sweeping driveway and the way it wraps around the side of the house.  Look at all the space…

Err…. what space?

(Isn't the google image of the garbage bag plunked next the encroaching neighbour's driveway priceless?)

Now let's take a look a real aerial view and compare it to the 3d rendering:

vs

Do you get a sense of how compact the property is from any of the pictures in these photos?

What about in the pictures from the Toronto Star spread?

Not only do the news stories fail to give us any perspective on the real layout of the actual property, none make note that in May 2012 this house was listed at $8,900,000. Nor do they tell us that in June of 2013 the house was pimped for only $7,500,000.

So why is the inflated $11 million figure prominently bantered about?

To say these photos bear a passing resemblance to the reality of the property is beyond generous. And if the builder is wiling to mislead buyers with photoshopped promotional exterior pictures, you have to wonder what other surprises await on the inside.

Yet our gullible media, rather than expose the false pictures for what they are, simply regurgitate the press release and provide free advertising for a builder who seems to do everything but 'build trust'.

Sigh.

Of course why would we expect mainstream newspapers like the Vancouver Sun or the Toronto Star to ferret out truth and protect the public interest?

It's not like they have had to rationalize publishing fake mansion pictures before, right?

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Remember the fake mansion which gained notoriety as Canada's most expensive listing?

Time to do a little catch up today.

You all remember our February 27th post about Canada's most expensive listing and it's role as the latest chapter in Vancouver R/E media manipulation?

It was the West Vancouver property we dubbed the 'fake mansion' because the pictures were of a non-existent house.

As the photos went viral around the world, the reality came out about how the  media was duped.

After the hype died down, some semblance of reality set in. On September 3rd we told you how the asking price of the property was reduced by $25 million (or 66% ). That reduction brought the asking price down to $12,888,000 for a property assessed at $6,768,500.

Last month our infamous fake mansion finally sold, we are told, for $8 million.

Did Canada's most expensive listing suffer Canada's greatest price drop?  Or is it another property that sold for way over assessed value?

Like so much in real estate these days, it could be both a glass half empty and a glass half full.

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Wed Post #2: Huffington Post carries story of 'fake mansion' being marked down $25 million.

On Tuesday we told you  how West Van's infamous 'fake mansion', once Canada's most expensive listing at $38 million, had been marked down by $25 million.

We wondered if the Vancouver Sun or Province newspaper would pick up on the story with the same gusto shown back in February when they helped the fake pictures go viral around the world, but to date there's been no response (thus reinforcing their inevitable slide into irrelevance).

But that doesn't mean the mainstream press is ignoring the story.

The Huffington Post has picked up the ball and run with it: Canada's Most Expensive House Marked Down by $25 Million (hat tip: Many Franks):

One day you're Canada's most expensive house, the next you're just a teardown on a ritzy piece of land.

A seaside property located at 3810 Marine Drive in West Vancouver, which was the country's priciest listing last February, has been marked down from $38 million to $12,888,000. That's a hefty drop of $25 million and change.

Current listing agent Lionel Lorence, couldn't say why the original asking price was so high, but acknowledged there was little reality behind the colossal tag.

"The real estate values on the West Vancouver waterfront are rich prices, but this one when it came out, at $37.9 million, seemed to be exorbitant," he told The Huffington Post B.C.

The house itself is a teardown, but the value is in the land, The North Shore Outlook reported in February.

The rancher bungalow built by a shipping magnate in 1964 sits on a 34,000-square-foot lot with unobstructed views of the waterfront, with enough space to subdivide the property into three estates.

That's how West Vancouver realtors Laura McLaren and George Tsavdaris came up with the price at the time, figuring that any of three lots could be worth $10 million, while the house itself could go for $7.9 million, they told the newspaper.

The agents may have been a tad hopeful in pitching the prospect of a subdivision, said UBC real estate expert Tsur Somerville.

"It seems very, very optimistic on what they'd be able to get from the city in terms of a rezoning or a subdivision," he said.

Canada's most expensive home today is anything but a teardown. For $35 million, you can have a nine-bedroom Shaughnessy mansion with stained-glass windows, an art deco parkade and an oak-panelled elevator.

Tsur Somerville paints the realtor's responsible for that debacle - Laura McLaren and George Tsavdaris - as a 'tad optimistic.'

Personally we say Tsur is being a 'tad' polite.

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Is reality starting to creep into the Greater Vancouver real estate market? - Updated

As sales continue to lag and it becomes apparent that the removal of the HST is not going to trigger a house buying frenzy, is some semblance of reality finally creeping into the Lower Mainland real estate market?

Realtor Arnold Shuchat is out with his latest price drops for Vancouver and Richmond. Leading the Vancouver price cuts is #208-1001 Richards Street.

This 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom condo in downtown Vancouver is currently assessed at $331,000.  Up until this week the owners had been asking an insane $629,000.  They have now slashed their asking price to $366,900 - a 42% drop.

It's still priced too high but at least it's more realistic and a sign sellers are starting to accept the reality of the market.

Another such sign comes from our perennial favourite at 3390 The Crescent:

We first profiled this 6 bedroom, 8 bathroom 10,516 square foot mansion (which sits on over an acre of land in the heart of Vancouver's toniest neighbourhood) back on November 22, 2011.

The current owners bought this home in April 2004 for $6 million.

In 2010 the home was listed for sale for $17.9 million, but there were no takers at that 'bargain' price.

After looking at the high prices mansions were commanding in Shaughnessy (a house that sold in 2010 on Angus Drive for $5.7 million was assessed in 2011 at $9 million), the owners jacked their asking price from $17.9 million to $31.9 million.

That's right... the home failed to sell so they doubled the asking price.

(For reference the house is currently assessed at $16,076,000)

In September 2012 the asking price was slashed to $22,000,000. This week it was cut again, this time back down to $17,800,000.

Still over assessed value, but another insane asking price has been trimmed to just over assessed value.

(hat tip UBC in crisis mode)

Finally there is the infamous Fake Mansion in West Vancouver.

This was the West Vancouver waterfront tear down assessed at $6,768,500 whose chief selling feature was the fact the property could be subdivided into 3 lots.

The seller was asking $28 million but when there were no takers, the agent listing the property gained world wide attention when the house was portrayed as Canada's most expensive listing (asking price raised to $38 million).

To help drive attention, images of a mansion that doesn't even exist were posted with the the listing and the property went viral on the internet.

When the dust settled from the resultant brouhaha, the asking price was cut back to $28 million.

Now the seller has ditched the original realtor, listed with a new agent, and the asking price has been dropped to $19,888,000, that's 48% slashed from that ridiculous February asking price.

(hat tip Observer)

As Observer notes, this property might well now lay claim to the biggest price drop in Canadian history - $18 million and counting. Chop another $10 million from the price and it just might sell.

Observer is now out with his top 10 price drops of the week and the list provides more evidence that sellers are begrudgingly accepting reality. You don't even make this week's list of price drops unless you have chopped $4 million from your asking price! A statistic which, in and of itself, is just too bizarre for words.

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Imaginary houses for imaginary buyers

Filed under the Aneedotes and Humour category, the contributors at Vancouver Peak provide their take on the imaginary house/fake mansion story:

(It may be a crack shack, but it's made of SOLID GOLD1)

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Fake mansion photos appear again, this time in the Vancouver Province. Is it time for the RECBC to draft guidelines for the way a listing can market a property? - UPDATED

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UPDATE: See below for response fron Vancouver Province Editor Erik Rolfsen

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Yesterday we talked about the big news in real estate this week, the release of the R/E sales statistics for February, 2013.

The story was in all the media, but did you happen to notice the March 4th Vancouver Province Newspaper article titled "Vancouver home sales plunge 29% in February, prices fall"? (that's a screenshot of the story above).

 Did you notice the picture and caption accompanying the story?

The photo caption says: "The exterior of 3810 Marine Drive in West Vancouver.  The 5,500 square foot waterfront mansion is listed for $38 million."

Of course, if you follow this blog (and clearly the Province Newspaper does not), you know there is no such mansion. The house pictured isn't really there.

How is it that one of Vancouver's daily newspaper's continues to perpetuate this fallacy, particularly since the Province's sister newspaper - the Vancouver Sun - has already issued a statement about why it pulled the photos it published?

You will recall that Business in Vancouver explored the issue:

BIV noted that:

The story first appeared in the North Shore News on February 18 about a house listed for $38 million, accompanied by a photo of the real house, a sprawling rancher-style suburban home.

The fake photos went viral when the story was picked up by the Vancouver Sun, who added a photo gallery showing gilt-covered rooms in the style of Louis XVI and the opulent exterior of the house, taken from the realtor’s website.

The paper neglected to say that the images were photo illustrations. On February 25, the Sun published a correction, and the story has now been removed from its website.

But by then, the story had been picked up by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, who published the photos on its website under the headline: “The $38 million Vancouver mansion that is Canada's most expensive home and also one of its ugliest too.”

Realtor Laura McLaren said the blogger is wrong and that the photos on her site, which have now all been removed apart from the external shot (pictured above), were always identified as photo renderings of "what could be built on this property."

“The pictures are renderings and you can see that they’re renderings … Each picture had ‘these are renderings,’” said McLaren.

But as we noted in our original post, the main page of the real estate agent's website gave no indication that the photos were renderings.

When you clicked on the listing, the summary page showed 19 thumbnail photos.  This summary page also gave no indication that any of these photos were "renderings".  

The official explanation is that this was all clearly explained in small captions on the individual photos themselves.

The media frenzy supposedly erupted when the fourth estate horde (and misguided bloggers) failed to research the issue. If they had only read the fine print on individual photos from the agent's website, the media would have known better and not run with the errors in this story. 

Yes, there were 19 photos in the agent's webpage listing.  Yes, 13 of those 19 photos showed a 'fake' mansion... and yes, there were only two actual photos of the real house on the property in that listing (aerial ones at that and no interior pictures); but the fine print explains it all?

Is this really an acceptable way to present a property for sale in the eyes of the Real Estate Council of BC?

(One has to wonder that if it's a property being promoted for 'what can be done with the land', why is it there were no 'renderings' promoting how the lot could be subdivided into three - it's chief selling feature? Why no photos of what the property might look like with 3 smaller mansions on the site alongside those of the gaudy mansion showing what could be done if one house were built?)

So what we have here is a story the North Shore News originally published February 18th (a story, it must be noted, that only carried one photo - that of the real teardown bungalow), morphed into one that was picked up by papers like the Edmonton Journal on February 19th (which carried the North Shore News reporter's byline - but now sported the fake mansion photo prominently), and by Saturday February 23rd it exploded onto the pages of the Vancouver Sun complete with all 13 'fake' photos presented as the actual mansion for sale (and going viral world-wide after that). 

Over a week later - even after having been exposed as fake - the gaudy facade is still being propagated by the Vancouver Province as an actual home for sale.

How was this allowed to happen?

How did this story morph so badly from the one that appeared February 18th in the North Shore News as a teardown bungalow to the one that appeared February 19th in the Edmonton Journal as a gaudy, opulent mansion?

Don't the 'renderings' and the way they were presented play a key role here?

As one contributor to the comments section of this blog observed, if this is the new standard for real estate marketing in Greater Vancouver why not simply graft a picture of the Burj Khalifa overtop of the local crack shack property?

If the Real Estate Council of BC (RECBC) doesn't have guidelines to protect the public, why not fake things in a big, big way?

In the meantime, perhaps the RECBC can contact the Vancouver Province and set them straight on what's actually on the land at 3810 Marine Drive?

Someone should do something to sort out the ongoing media confusion.

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UPDATE: Response from Vancouver Province Editor Erik Rolfsen posted in comments section:

If you had been paying attention two weeks ago when every media outlet in town was scrambling to post a gallery of this phony house, you might have noticed that The Province was the one outlet that had it right. That's because I personally picked up the phone and questioned the agent representing this property about the suspicious images. He graciously explained that they were indeed artist's renderings. We included this information on the photo gallery we published on our site at the time (we were the only ones to do so), but we later suppressed it altogether because it seems pointless to show people photos of a house that doesn't exist.

The story you reference above is a wire story from Canadian Press that was packaged by CP on Monday and appeared on our site via an automated feed to which we subscribe. Clearly they searched the archives for a recent listing to accompany their story and grabbed one of the renderings. I see that somebody has since brought the error to their attention and the photo no longer accompanies their package.

Thanks for the attention, though.

Erik Rolfsen (Province News Editor)

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