Added Time for Project Approval Pays Off for Developer After Initial Opposition

By Dan Guetre

A land developer with a project in the area known as Lorette West is now marketing the lots in stage 1 after spending an extra year on the project in attempt to appease neighbouring residents who opposed the way the development was designed.

“Change is always difficult, but people get used to it over time,” said Alan Klippenstein, Director of Real Estate Development for Schinkel Developments. “It’s always hard ‘seeing’ what things will look like on paper.”

A proposed berm around the property unified the neighbouring opposition who envisioned water drainage issues and a potential for the flooding of their own lots.

“On the engineered drawings the berm looks like a massive obstacle but now with it built it is barely a bump on the horizon, so I think that people that were concerned will not be anymore,” noted Klippenstein.

“We actually think that home owners will see this as a feature as it breaks up the landscape.”

Klippenstein recognizes where the neighbours were coming from and believes the delay in getting Phase 1 underway was something he believes was necessary.

“As I mentioned before, change is hard and so we tried to make ourselves available to be able to answer questions or discuss concerns that people had,” he noted. “With this project in particular, there were concerns about flooding so we spent an additional year having engineers and the province review and model this subdivision to make sure that we would not impact our neighbours.”

Klippenstein says his team also held an Open House even before their application was submitted and followed up with a virtual meeting for those who had questions. The virtual meeting included Klippenstein and their engineer who were both available to answer any questions, including discussing flooding concerns.

With a typical development taking one to two years from start to finish, in the end, Klippenstein believes the extra year for review and approval was necessary in order to double check all the data.

The new residential development has a name a sales team assigned. Petite Pointe is ready to go.

“We are just completing phase 1 of 2 in this subdivision,” explained Klippenstein. “Phase 1 has 22 lots and phase 2 will have 24.”

As with any new development, it will take some time before the new neighbourhood is populated.

“We assume it will take about 4 years to sell out,” he noted. “One of the features to this subdivision is that we built the entire berm protecting the property in phase 1. The only remaining work for phase 2 is the road construction.”

Mike Fast with Royal LePage has been put in charge of attracting families to make Petite Pointe a place they can call home, and even with the delay, he is looking forward to seeing the new community fill in.

“It’s always difficult to see the field you enjoyed in your back yard developed and we empathize with that,” said Fast. “The good news is that statistically developments like this raise neighbouring property value which folks notice over time and typically are a fan of.”

He pointed out that historically, opinions from neighbours usually change, a trend that he has seen from previous developments.

“Acreages also tend to look very beautiful once developed and we have had many compliments years later from some of