Whistler real estate, and trying to gauge the Olympic effect'
Friday, January 29th, 2010 6:01 pm By Canwest Global


VANCOUVER – Let the sales pitch begin.
With the 2010 Olympics at Vancouver and Whistler's doorstep, one local real estate insider has crunched a decade's-worth of Whistler sales results to make the case that the 2010 Olympics have given the resort's real estate a boost, and that – despite the recent global recession – property there is still a good investment.
"I still think there will be a good positive side to the Whistler story," Rudy Nielsen, president of research firm Landcor Data Corp., said in an interview.
Nielsen chronicles a doubling of Whistler's property values and widening sphere of international buyers there over the last decade to support his case.
Others are skeptical that the massive free-advertising campaign of the Olympics is having more of an effect on Whistler real estate than the improvement of transportation infrastructure on the Sea to Sky corridor, but Nielsen believes the exposure has to count for something.
"I think people will realize that this is a world-class place to be, and not only Whistler but Vancouver and British Columbia," he said.
Landcor, in a report released this week, has compiled a list of trends from examining the resort community's sales as recorded by the B.C. Land Titles office.
Between 2000 and 2010, with the 2008 financial crisis that dented markets everywhere notwithstanding, Whistler saw 8,990 property sales among the 13,134 residential properties within the resort.
And the Landcor data records dramatic price increases over the decade, with a lot of the gains coming in the first half of the decade.
The average price for a condominium, Landcor found, rose 101 per cent over the decade to $380,000 by 2010.
Townhouse average values increased 104 per cent to $677,000 over the same time period.
Detached homes, Landcor said, saw the biggest gain, rising 141 per cent to hit an average of almost $1.4 million in 2010.
And Whistler's global circle has become wider, the Landcor data suggests, with the resort recording owners from 40 different countries compared with 13 countries just a few years ago.
Granted, the number of international owners outside of North America is still small, just 556, but Nielsen sees it as significant that the audience for the resort has widened. Some 83 owners are from South Pacific locales, three are from the Middle East, 13 hail from the Caribbean and even one from Africa.

In Whistler right now, Lisa Bjornson, general manager of the Whistler Real Estate Company, said it is difficult to tell what effect the Olympics are having on the market, but there is an assumption they will.
Bjornson said the community's real estate counterparts in Park City Utah, host of alpine events for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, told them to expect sales to dry up in the three months leading up to and three months following the Games, but agents have been making sales.
Bjornson added that the last quarter of 2009 saw Whistler's real estate sales recover from the downturn that hit in the last half of 2008.
And Bjornson said agents in her office have been booking appointments with clients for showings during the Olympics, so they do expect to be open for business.
"We just don't know who, if anybody, is buying after the Games as a result of the exposure yet," Bjornson said. "We just know that a lot of people are going to be here."
However, University of B.C. real estate expert Tsur Somerville expects that the gains Whistler is seeing come more from the improved Sea to Sky Highway and not the additional exposure.
"I'm not saying it's zero," Somerville said in an interview, but he is skeptical that the Games will give Whistler better exposure to the market of buyers likely to buy ski-resort property than it has already had.
Somerville, director of the centre for urban economics and real estate at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, released a report, co-authored with PhD candidate Jake Wetzel, on the effects that staging Olympics have had on property prices in host cities.
In their work, Somerville and Wetzel found that being an Olympic host city did not bump property prices up any more than surrounding, non-host locations.
Any gains, Somerville said, were more attributable to general economic conditions that were shared by non-host regions, or as a result of infrastructure improvements independent of the Games.
However, for Nielsen, who is also involved in developing recreational real estate with his other companies, a bit of a sales pitch can't hurt.
"[B.C.] is the greatest place on earth to live and I'm trying to promote it the best I can," he said.
depenner@vancouversun.com