VANCOUVER DEVELOPERS’ GLOBAL REACH
Vancouver property developers and the local companies that work with them have created a booming global export business. Do they get enough support at home?
Ian Gillespie speaks quietly, and he doesn't do small talk. As a Neil Young live album jangles on the stereo, the slender Westbank Projects Corp. founder sits in a corner of his roomy downtown Vancouver office, North Shore Mountains at his back. Fine-boned, dressed in jeans and a dark blazer, he looks more like someone from the art world than a property developer.
“There does not go a week here where I do not get a mayor of some Asian city coming to my office, wanting to talk about what's going on in Vancouver and how did we accomplish this and how could that help me over there,” Gillespie says.
Launched in 1992, luxury residential and mixed-use specialist Westbank is known for local landmarks such as the Woodward's redevelopment, Telus Garden and the Shangri-la Vancouver hotel. It's also the force behind Vancouver House and Alberni by Kengo Kuma, daring additions to the city skyline due for completion in 2018 and 2020, respectively. For those two towers, Gillespie is working with leading architects Bjarke Ingels of Denmark and Japan's Kengo Kuma.
Westbank, whose finished and current projects have a combined value of $25 billion, is a global player, too. With 12 offices in Canada, the U.S. and Asia, and 1,500 staff including those at its hotels, the company counts properties in Toronto, Seattle and Tokyo among its works in progress. “We're bigger outside Vancouver than inside Vancouver,” says Gillespie, who regularly holds art and design exhibits and lectures.
As he points out, Westbank is far from alone. “I could literally give you 100 firms that are doing work internationally,” Gillespie says. “And so it's thousands of people. It's big business.”
Besides developers, those firms range from architects, structural engineers and urban design consultants to model makers, concrete forming specialists and property marketers. With expertise honed by helping to create a new standard for livable, highdensity residential developments, often called Vancouverism, they've made their mark on cities from San Diego to Dubai to Dalian, China. But this thriving export business mostly flies under the radar back home.
When it comes to world cities with an influence on urban development and design, Vancouver punches above its weight, says David Thom, president of IBI Group Inc., a global architecture, planning, engineering and technology firm. “There's a lot to learn from what's happened in Vancouver, and that's been driven by a bit of a push and pull between the public sector and the private sector,” notes Vancouver-based Thom, the only IBI senior executive outside Toronto. “Some of the things that the city does from an urban design perspective and what's important have become embraced by the development community over the years. And that's really put Vancouver ahead of the curve.”
Other Vancouver developers with a footprint outside the province include Bosa Development Corp., whose founder, Natale (Nat) Bosa, entered Seattle in the 1970s before expanding his reach throughout Southern California. Concord Pacific Developments Inc.—its master-planned community on the former Expo 86 lands became a model for Vancouverism—is working in Toronto, London and Calgary. Onni Group is building several major projects in downtown Los Angeles, while Intergulf Development Group is active in Alberta and California.
By looking beyond B.C., these companies have created work for a host of local consultants and subtrades. “Basically, we followed developers down south,” says Geoffrey Glotman, managing principal of structural engineering firm Glotman Simpson, whose first U.S. job was in 1998, for Intergulf in San Diego. “We coattail on them. It's a pretty easy way to move around the globe.”
At home, Vancouver developers don't enjoy the same respect as they do abroad, contends veteran real estate marketer Bob Rennie. “We look at our kids, and we don't see how they grow up, and we always see them as our children,” Rennie says. “But the world looks at this
“There’s a lot to learn from what’s happened in Vancouver, and that’s been driven by a bit of a push and pull between the public sector and the private sector” — David Thom IBI Group
jurisdiction as a very, very mature homebuilding industry.”
The federal and provincial governments are quick to promote the technology and resource sectors, but you're unlikely to hear a politician talking up the development business. For Gillespie, it's a missed opportunity. “People only think of it as almost a necessary evil of densification and housing affordability and all this other noise,” he complains. Even those who look kindly upon his industry see it as a domestic concern rather than an exporter of the Vancouver experience, Gillespie adds. “I think it's something to be promoted, because if you have a successful export business, then support it.”
Larry Beasley stepped down as the City of Vancouver's co-director of planning on a Friday in August 2006. The following Monday he was on a plane to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, which had approached him about consulting. “There's hundreds of stories of people who found their own opportunity to market this different way of building cities,” says Beasley, founding principal of Beasley & Associates Inc., a Vancouverbased urban planning consultancy, and distinguished practice professor at UBC'S School of Community and Regional Planning. “As I work now all over the world and see what the state of modern city building is, I realize, `Wow, we do have a lot of answers that work in other places.' And a lot of people in this town were smart enough to realize that.”
After Expo 86, Beasley and his colleagues at City Hall, along with the local development and design communities, saw that Vancouver had to do something different, he says. The resource sector was on the decline, and Expo had shown that the world cared about the city by attracting many more visitors than expected. The plan, according to Beasley: “Reinvent Vancouver as a place that would draw people because of the quality of the place.”
Although there were disagreements, everyone learned as they worked together, says Beasley, whose firm's current and past work spans Canada, the U.S., Europe, China, the Middle East and Australia. Thanks to housing demand created by immigration, new ideas came to life quickly, on big sites that could model a new kind of development. “What that created was a lot of experts, and they were experts who were right in line with what a lot of people around the world were coming to see as a better way of building cities,” says Beasley, singling
“You go talk to real estate lenders at American banks and Canadian banks, and the Canadian bank lenders would run circles around them” — Ian Gillespie Westbank
out the late architect and urban development expert Bing Thom. “It wasn't about theories, and it wasn't about just talking. Everyone could see, `This is really pretty good.'”
Concord Pacific's 1988 purchase of the Expo lands made Vancouver a hotbed of property development, says Sid Landolt, co-founder and president of S&P Real Estate Corp., a Vancouverbased marketer of luxury highrises. During the early 1990s, while the rest of North America endured a real estate recession, the city boomed.
When things began to improve elsewhere in the middle of that decade, Vancouver was ready to take advantage, recalls Landolt, who has moved into Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Waikiki since he and business partner Peter Dupuis joined forces in 1983. Over the past 25 years the pair, who typically employ 40 to 50 staff at S&P, have sold roughly 25,000 condominiums.
“There was a lack of expertise in other markets and a tremendous amount of expertise in Vancouver,” Landolt says. “That's when the exporting really began.” This coincided with the rise of developer Intrawest Resorts Holdings Inc., which took skills sharpened at Whistler Blackcomb into ski resorts across the continent, Landolt adds.
Well before Expo, Nat Bosa was building in the U.S. “Nat's had one foot over the border virtually his entire career,” says Richard Weir, executive vice-president, real estate and development, with Bosa Development, whose head count in Vancouver, San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco is just over 100. “It's always been part of a diversification strategy for him.”
Bosa first went into Seattle in the late 1970s, when the Vancouver market was soft, explains Weir, who has been with the company for 20 years. He then branched out into Quebec, Hawaii, Oregon and Alberta before entering Southern California in the late '90s, starting with San Diego. “There are a lot of very sophisticated and well-capitalized developers in the United States, but on the West Coast, anyway, they haven't had the expertise in the residential highrise condominium space,” Weir says.
Today, at least half of Bosa Development's work is outside B.C., Weir estimates. In downtown Seattle, the company just completed Insignia, two residential towers with a total of 698 units. It's the city's first post-recession condo development and one of the largest such projects ever undertaken there, Weir says.
“Nat [Bosa]'s had one foot over the border virtually his entire career. It's always been part of a diversification strategy for him.” — Richard Weir Bosa Development