News of Cadillac Fairview’s proposal for a 65-storey, 580-unit rental apartment tower at Queen and Yonge St. in Downtown Toronto is interesting for Vancouver observers. The proposal indicates that the development will have zero parking stalls. Instead, it will include 580 bicycle spaces are planned instead. The building appears to be absent of unit balconies as well.

This particular site includes demolition of an existing retail space and preservation of an existing heritage building, and based upon the location, parking probably won’t be necessity for most urban residents.

This begs an interesting question however, would the outright or partial relaxation of parking requirements for a downtown rental project be viable from a rental or construction perspective? There are many buildings in the West End that do not have any parking, and this does not appear to impact rents…

Recent efforts to reduce parking requirements for Vancouver condo projects have yielded mixed results; such as the MC2 project at Marine and Cambie where units sans obligatory parking stall were apparently much slower to sell. Is rental different?

We have sold 425 Twelfth Street in New Westminster. The building is a 34-unit strata titled apartment building that was offered to the market last year. The purchase price was $5,875,000, or $173,000 per unit. We achieved a premium valuation for our client as a result of the buildings age (15 years) relative to the average age of an apartment building in New Westminster (almost 50 years). Contact us for further details.

125 Agnes Street, a 19-unit apartment building in New Westminster has been sold for $2,100,000, or $110,000 / 4.5% cap rate.

A 14-unit apartment building in the South Granville area has sold for $4,000,000, representing a 3.4% cap rate and $286,000 per unit. The building had originally been listed for $5,000,000, but the price was later reduced to $4,400,000. The building, known as St. Charles Apartments, was built in 1927 but was substantially renovated.

Darwin Construction has applied to the District of North Vancouver to rezone 4 single family lots at 1561-1583 Oxford Street. The proposal is for 107 rental apartment units and 2,168 sq ft of commercial floorspace in a 6 storey building over 96 parking stalls. The proposed density is 3.35 FSR, which exceeds the 2.5 FSR medium density floor space envisioned in the District’s Official Community Plan.

The site located at the south end of the Lower Lynn Town Centre adjacent to Phibbs Exchange. The Lower Lynn Area Plan is expected to be adopted later in 2013.