FRIDAY
April 10 2015
Vol. 106 No. 28
PACIFIC SPIRIT 12
Vaisakhi celebrations DINING 22
Campari shortage hits home SPORTS 23
Resting with karate There’s more online at
vancourier.com WEEKEND EDITION
THE VOICE of VANCOUVER NEIGHBOURHOODS since 1908
Bank land, sell high
Realtor groups lots for big profit Frank O’Brien
Danny Maloney, 62, was a fixture in Kitsilano, where he sold the Megaphone newspaper and its predecessors at Fourth and Vine for more than 20 years.
PHOTO DAN TOULGOET
A humble presence in Kits Street newspaper seller remembered by community Mike Howell
mhowell@vancourier.com
To many who passed him by on the sidewalk, he was the rough-and-tumble guy in the big sweater at the corner of Fourth and Vine hawking the Megaphone street newspaper. To those who stopped to give him two bucks for the paper and stayed long enough to exchange more than a hello and a goodbye, they found a new friend in Danny Maloney. He had many friends. About 100 of them, including his sister Debby, turned out Tuesday to a lounge in the Kitsilano Community Centre to pay tribute to the 62-year-old man. He $
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died last month of lung disease at his Commercial Drive apartment. “Danny wasn’t big on sharing his feelings, though I think he would thank the Kitsilano community for providing him with a home and making it a place where he felt safe and accepted,” said Janice McTaggart, who spoke to the crowd on behalf of Maloney’s overwhelmed sister, who wiped away tears as she stood next to her friend at the front of the room. An enlarged photograph of her brother, a large bouquet of flowers and an urn containing Maloney’s ashes filled the space to her right. A short movie about Maloney played in a loop on a back wall. Before her, were rows of people in folding chairs, some she knew, some she
didn’t and others, such as Sean Condon who had a special relationship with Maloney as executive director of Megaphone, she met for the first time. A mix of men and women, including workers from the Whole Foods on Fourth where Maloney became a friend to the staff, listened and shared stories for more than an hour about their favourite street vendor. Stuart Rush, a 20-year Kitsilano resident, described Maloney as a “welcoming sentinel” to many in the neighbourhood, saying that “Danny’s passing has left a hole in Kits.” The Maloney he knew was “a visible conscience” to a homogeneous Kitsilano, bringing street life, poverty and “part of everyday existence” into the community. Continued on page 5
Two of Vancouver realtor Michelle Yu’s clients flew all the way from Taiwan to give her a hug when she sold their Cambie Street residential lot for $4.3 million after other realtors had estimated its value at $1.8 million. Yu, born in Hong Kong and educated in Toronto, is a Re/Max specialist in selling multiple adjacent residential lots — referred to as assemblies — in Canada’s mother of all housing booms. By keeping acutely aware of Vancouver’s official community plans, forging close ties with developers and working exclusively for vendors, she is known for doubling the values of houses along the hot real estate corridors of the West Side. An example is nine contiguous lots she assembled recently along the south end of Granville Street, the airport-to-downtown artery. In July 2014, the B.C. Assessment Authority said the single-family lots were worth about $1.7 million each. Yu banked them into a single development parcel that sold this year for $33.4 million, or an average of $3.7 million per lot. Doubling of values is common if a land assembly is successful, Yu said. Often, a block of Vancouver house owners will get together and agree to sell their properties as a single land play, she said. “Then they call me.” Yu meets with her architect and city planners to ascertain the land’s development potential. She notes that the city’s official community plan is posted online so it is easy to determine if higher-density zoning is possible. The official community plan, for example, may suggest the land could be developed to a 2.5 floor space ratio, meaning that a 10,000-square-foot single-family lot is suddenly 25,000 square feet of potential townhomes that can sell for $900 per square foot. While the profits can be startling, land banking does present challenges, said Yu and other agents familiar with Vancouver lot assemblies. Continued on page 4 $
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