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REAL ESTATE: The Mountains are Calling
THE MOUNTAINS ARE CALLING
RECORD REAL ESTATE DEALS ARE DRIVING CONSTRUCTION AND RELATED INDUSTRIES TO NEW HEIGHTS IN WHISTLER AND PEMBERTON
STORY BY ALISON TAYLOR
From the ultra wealthy to the humble ski bum, Whistler has always had a laid-back, universal appeal.
Fresh air. Clean water. A safe town. Breathtaking mountains. A close-knit community. Sophisticated, irreverent style. An unbeatable way of life.
And yet, high-end homebuyers didn’t come around every day, despite this being the No. 1 ski resort in North America and the world’s mountain bike Mecca. Until now that is.
Seven years ago for example, there were three real estate deals over the $5 million mark, according to the Whistler Listing System.” In the ensuing years, those deals stealthily gained traction—a dozen in 2016, a few more than that in 2019.
But who could have ever predicted the staggering 30 sales over $5 million in 2020? Bear in mind, most of those deals happened in the latter half of the year as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to wreak havoc in Whistler and around the world. This year is setting up to break even more records with 10 sales already over $5 million in the first three months of 2021.
Now, more than ever before, Whistler is where everyone wants to be, as people search for safe haven and happiness, space and closeness to nature, away from the worldwide chaos. It doesn’t come as any surprise to longtime realtor Maggi Thornhill of Engel & Völkers who understood Whistler’s appeal, and potential, more than 30 years ago when she first arrived.
“It’s a coming of age,” she says of the recent changes to the marketplace sparked by COVID. Whistler, she adds, always had the potential to compete with the best places in the world; the pandemic just sped it up.
“It’s not just a coming of age of recreational real estate,” she says. “It’s a coming of age of the community of Whistler that can sustain people full time.”
THIS GATED ESTATE PROPERTY AT 6715 CRABAPPLE DRIVE IS CURRENTLY LISTED FOR $19,995,000.
The high-end market is just a microcosm of what’s going on in real estate in general: record-breaking deals, intense bidding wars, buyers snapping up properties site unseen, bold subject-free offers. It’s a frenzy of activity. And with it, the spin off effects in construction, renovation and design.
Rebecca Craig, owner of Whistler Lifestyle Design, a company that offers home staging, interior design and decorating, says: “As soon as we stage a property, it’s sold within 24 hours.”
While that makes her job extremely labour intensive and busy at the moment, Craig admits it’s a good problem to have.
While the global pandemic has been very tough on Whistler’s main industries—tourism and hospitality—real estate, and by extension other related trades, has been booming. This isn’t a Whistler-only phenomenon. The same story is playing out from coast to coast in Canada, driven in part by record low interest rates designed to stimulate the economy and more and more people wanting to escape larger centres for places they feel are safer, especially now that many are able to work from home. WHISTLER’S ETERNAL APPEAL
Before she can even begin to talk about real estate in Whistler, realtor Wendi Warm, owner of Whistler Real Estate Company, says this: “It’s really tough to watch the town we love struggling.”
Indeed. This year has not been without its challenges in Whistler, as it has been around the world. Occupancy in hotels has reached record lows. Restaurants have closed, reopened, and closed again, pivoting to takeout-only options in the efforts to stay afloat. Whistler Blackcomb, once again, cut its season short in March. And the closed borders effectively cut off Whistler, which relies on both domestic and international tourists, from the rest of the world.
Warm remembers the initial panic and uncertainty when COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic. What would a global pandemic mean for a town like Whistler?
In early 2020, everyone was on edge. By June/July, however, the market began its upward swing. >>
THE TEAM AT TM BUILDERS, LED BY TOM MCCOLM PICTURED CENTRE, IS GEARING UP FOR A BUSY FEW YEARS, PARTICULARLY IN PEMBERTON.
“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that it would just be a few months,” admits Warm of the temporary market cooling in the first half of last year.
Wealthy Vancouver families who could no longer travel south to the desert or the Hawaiian beach for vacations, instead looked north. They wanted a place where they could bring their COVID bubbles. Thornhill says they were blown away with what they found here: the great community, the amenities, the sophistication and style, the incredible architecture, and perhaps most importantly, the 1.5 hour proximity to Vancouver. Whistler wasn’t just a place to visit on the weekends; it was a place they could potentially call home full-time, especially as they became more familiar with the community.
“Whistler is the perfect fit for so many people,” says Thornhill.
While the bulk of the interest was from buyers in the Lower Mainland, Ontario buyers also made more headway in the market, almost doubling from five per cent of the marketplace to closer to nine per cent in 2020.
Warm points to two factors driving the momentum over the past nine months: there were buyers looking to upgrade from a townhouse or a condo and into a place where they could spread out and, in particular, work remotely from home; and, there were buyers who always wanted to own in Whistler and saw this as their opportunity to have a different lifestyle. “It was a shift in their mindset,” Warm explains. “That really played into the energy of the market.”
THE SPINOFFS
The timing couldn’t have been better for designer Caroline Jones. Three years ago Jones took a leap of faith and started Painted Door Designs. Little did she understand at the time just how much demand there was for interior design services in Whistler.
“I just kept getting busier and busier,” she says.
The past year has only amplified that as she helps full-time residents and second homeowners repurpose spaces in their homes for home offices and home gyms as well as owners taking temporary cooling in the rental market as a chance to update their properties.
Take one of her American clients, looking to update his space at his Montebello townhouse, where the units can be rented out nightly. Initially, Jones was hired to buy new furniture for the unit. One of the first fallouts from COVID was the worldwide shipping delays. With those delays and then the drop in the rental market, Jones pitched her client with a plan to update the 20-year-old Montebello unit to today’s “mountain modern” style. “We unleashed our imagination,” says Jones. >>
REALTOR WENDI WARM AND SON PHELAN REGAN ARE THE NEW OWNERS OF WHISTLER REAL ESTATE COMPANY, TAKING OVER IN DECEMBER 2020.
DARBY MAGILL
PAINTED DOOR DESIGNS UPDATES THIS 20-YEAR-OLD MONTEBELLO CONDO WITH A FRESH “MOUNTAIN MODERN” DESIGN. OWNER CAROLINE JONES, WHO STARTED PAINTED DOOR DESIGNS THREE YEARS AGO, BRINGS COLOUR AND TEXTURE TO HER PROJECTS.
That meant in addition to new furnishings, Painted Door changed the paint and fixtures and refinished the interior doors and the kitchen cabinets for a fresh new look. It always feels good, she adds, to update a home by reusing and repurposing much of what’s there rather than sending good materials to the landfill.
“This was the perfect project to utilize that. It’s still mountain cozy,” says Jones of the space, “but now it’s modern and contemporary. I love colour, patterns, textures, adding depth and interest, drama and playfulness. The beauty with design is that there’s no wrong move. If it makes you happy, it works.”
And, it also gives this Montebello property the leg up when it comes to marketing the unit online for future rentals.
Like Painted Door, local builder Tom McColm, of TM Builders, is busier than ever. He has been steadily growing his business since he opened his doors in 2008. This year, however, is off the charts. He is projecting to double his busiest year, which was 2018. Much of his work on the books in the coming years is in Pemberton. It’s often called “Pemberdise,” which speaks to its appeal as a sleepy farming community nestled in a valley of mountains with iconic Mount Currie dominating the skyline.
The pandemic, McColm says, created the perfect storm in his business as people looked for bigger space, smaller communities and a different pace of life. Pemberton checks all those boxes, and then some. And in Pemberton, for the time being at least, the land is still reasonable compared to surrounding locales. Not to mention, it’s close to the largest ski resort in North America and within driving distance of Vancouver. TM Builders has several projects on the go in 2021, including single family home and townhouse builds in Pemberton’s Sunstone development.
McColm is optimistic that the industry will stay busy in the coming years despite major challenges of manpower and materials. “Normally we have a big influx of international workers and that just didn’t happen last year,” he says.
He also recognizes the good fortune to be in an industry that is not just surviving the pandemic, but thriving. The construction industry has long been the backbone of the resort economy, keeping hundreds of locals gainfully employed year-round in steady, well-paying jobs, driving economic activity in Whistler. SETTING NEW RECORDS
It remains to be seen if Whistler will keep smashing its own records, and what that may mean to the people who live and visit here in the long run.
When it comes to the most exclusive places to live, the real estate activity continues to reach new heights.
In Kadenwood, with its private gondola and ski in/ski out out access on Whistler Mountain, there have been close to a dozen transactions from June 2020 to April 2021. The lowest sale (not including the three vacant lots that sold) was $7.4 million; the highest was $15.5 million, setting another record.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the valley, the Stonebridge neighbourhood, with its sprawling estate lots, has set a different kind of record: Whistler’s most expensive home. It sold for $19 million in October 2020.
“They are hitting new milestones,” confirms Warm.
The energy, the interest and the buying power remain high. The question stands: What will happen when the borders reopen and more high-end international buyers turn their minds to this mountain town?
That, of course, is anyone’s guess. W “THIS WAS THE PERFECT PROJECT TO UTILIZE THAT. IT’S STILL MOUNTAIN COZY, BUT NOW IT’S MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY.”
– Caroline Jones
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