SERIES 1/3: "Feulling a resort-building boom on Vancouver Island"

Calgarians and Edmontonians are snapping up homes on golf and waterfront properties

THE ALBERTA EFFECT
A three-part series into how the powerful Alberta economy is affecting British Columbia.
1/3: Fuelling a resort-building boom on Vancouver Island
2/3: Border towns -- living and thriving in Alberta's shadow.
3/3: Our Prairie cousins excel in a "maverick culture."

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VANCOUVER ISLAND - Alberta money is fuelling a resort-building boom on Vancouver Island. Golf and waterfront resorts totalling thousands of units are under construction, clustered within easy distance of the island's two main airports in Victoria and the Comox Valley.

Dean Mein bought a one-bedroom condo at Bear Mountain just outside of Victoria two years ago and took possession of the unit in August. The painting contractor from Sherwood Park, Alta., bought a second two-bedroom unit last year for $540,000. It will not be finished for another year.

With business booming back home, Mein isn't tempted to pull up stakes and move to B.C.

Mein and his wife Jacquie, both in their 40s, have flown out a handful of times in the past few months to use the property and golf, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Mein played 97 holes over four days on his last trip out.

"We could retire [at Bear Mountain], but nothing is written in stone," Mein explained. "We are going to buy a place in Phoenix next week, too.

"The biggest thing for us is the investment."

Bear Mountain is a sprawling resort community built around two 18-hole golf courses designed by the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus. Executive homes sell for as much as $3 million. Condos and townhomes range from $350,000 to about $1.7 million.

And are they selling.

Late last year a one-day sale of 183 condominiums sold out in two hours, bringing the resort about $103 million. A similar sale in 2005 raked in $140 million.

Bear Mountain's director of real estate, Dale Sproule, says about 40 per cent of the units sell to Albertans -- and to them, location is everything. Langford is about two hours from Nanaimo by car and almost that by ferry from the mainland. Mein can get to his front door at Bear Mountain from Edmonton in three hours.

With the growth of a Whistler-like village at Bear Mountain, vacationers and retirees needn't even have a car, Sproule explained.

"We discovered a market in Alberta early on and we do advertise heavily in that market," said Sproule. "By the time we were into our third phase, the trend was becoming obvious."

"We have a lot of options for people buying for vacation or investment," Sproule explained. Owners can use the property for vacations or have Bear Mountain's property management arm rent their suite out for them. Several Alberta buyers have purchased more than one unit, he said.

Bear Mountain has sold more than 1,000 units total, in 11 phases of lot sales and eight condominium buildings since 2002. About 120 units in three more buildings will go up for sale this summer. The total build-out for Bear Mountain will be 5,000 doors, mainly condos.

Predictably, the people willing to pony up for a piece of paradise are coming from outside of B.C.

The Falls is a building of seven townhomes with prices ranging from $1.4 million to $1.7 million. Five of them sold as second homes to people with addresses from Hawaii to Red Deer, Sproule said.

A tight construction labour market and spiralling costs for materials like lumber and concrete have kept companies like Bear Mountain conservative about the rate at which they pre-sell and build.

Selling in phases protects against rising construction costs. Several projects in the Victoria area collapsed under the weight of spiralling costs, leaving hundreds of buyers who thought they had purchased pre-construction units with nothing to show for their investment.

"The biggest fear you have is if you sell your building out and the cost of construction rises above what you took in," Sproule said.

BUILDING GOING 'GREAT GUNS'

Demand for vacation and retirement property is spilling into all the communities between Victoria and Campbell River.

Passenger traffic at the Comox airport has gone from 131,000 in 2001 to over 300,000 today. WestJet and Air Canada have both added direct flights to Comox from Edmonton and Calgary.

Justin Fryer retired about five years ago as a partner with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Calgary and settled with his wife near Duncan. The Fryers' westward odyssey actually began decades ago in Britain and includes 22 years in Montreal and 10 years in Calgary.

Fryer visited the Island on business and for a vacation over the years, and fell in love with the lifestyle and a climate that affords year-round recreation.

He keeps busy in retirement giving rowing instruction to local public school rowing teams.

"Here the amazing thing is that you can row 12 months of the year," he said. "My wife can do the same with her tennis."

Their Maple Bay home is just three minutes from the rowing club and about the same distance to the tennis courts.

"It's absolutely perfect," he said. "I coach my rowing teams right on Maple Bay."

Similar opportunities for winter rowing in Calgary -- or Montreal for that matter -- are extremely limited.

Like ripples in a pond, the "Alberta effect" washes over every aspect of economic life. The money for builders is now in ocean-front condos and recreational destinations like Victoria's Bear Mountain, according to Woody Hayes, an accountant and real-estate developer with offices sprinkled through the Island's communities.

"The construction industry is going great guns, so that's a positive impact," Hayes said. But what they are building has changed. Condos and executive homes are where the money is, especially in Duncan, where he is based.

"No one builds rental apartments any more, you can't make money on them fast enough," Hayes said. As a result, the vacancy rate is under one per cent in Courtenay and just barely over one per cent in Victoria.

Homelessness was unheard of just a few years ago, but today Duncan has a permanent population of people sleeping outdoors, Hayes said. "It's a small town, so to see that level of discomfort is unusual," Hayes explained.

"We have people panhandling on the street. We've never had that," he said. "They have no place to go because there's no cheap rental accommodation."

Courtenay city councillor Murray Presley says his town, too, isn't seeing development applications for affordable housing or rental apartments like it did just 10 years ago.

While contractors are doing well building for a well-monied new wave of retirees, smaller businesses and restaurants can't afford to keep their staff. Many of the town's restaurants have help-wanted signs hanging in the window.

Courtenay is being reshaped by Alberta money. Wal-Mart has moved in, along with many of its big-box cousins.

Not far from the Comox airport is Crown Isle Resort and Golf Community. Their slogan -- come in for a tee time, stay for a lifetime -- is not aimed at retiring sawmill employees or displaced workers from crumbling fishing and logging industries.

"People moving here are 55 and older and either retired or commuting to Vancouver or Calgary for work," Hayes said. "And they've got lots of money."

And that's fine as long as you aren't one of the people who doesn't have a lot of money.

"The price of a home has been pushed up past the young person's ability to pay at the entry level," Hayes said. "An entry level house in Duncan or Courtenay is now $350,000, so it's awful tough for someone making $25 an hour to buy."

"Fifteen years ago it was $125,000."

(prepared by Randy Shore/Vancouver Sun)