Tag Archives: cityzen development group
Chilling On The Outskirts
Due west: a little less action, but great prices and how about that waterfront
Lisa Van de Ven, National Post
The Toronto real estate market is back in a big way, fueled largely by first-time buyers. Low mortgage rates and a generally secure employment situation in the GTA are giving these young renters and still-at-homes the confidence to purchase.
Overwhelmingly, they are choosing Toronto condos. Every week this summer, Post Homes will look at first-time options in selected neighbourhoods and the local amenities that will help create active and successful communities. This week, it’s Toronto’s far west.
There are first-time homebuyers who want to live downtown in the middle of the hustle and bustle. Then there are those who’d prefer to be close to the city, but not in the thick of it.
Which is why some first-time buyers travel towards Etobicoke and Mississauga when it’s time for house hunting to begin. While location may be a big draw, the prices don’t hurt either — in many cases, traveling a little further out of the core, gives them much more bang for their buck.
“They would love to be downtown, but they can’t necessarily afford downtown prices,” says Debbie Cosic, principal and broker with In2ition Realty.
Ms. Cosic is representing Holiday Towers at Holiday Drive and Highway 427 in Etobicoke, where approximately half of all the buyers are first-timers. Suites start at $180,900 and 480 square feet. The site, by developers FRAM Building Group and Avari Group, is still close to amenities, though.
“Etobicoke is right between Toronto and the far west end –Mississauga, Burlington, everywhere,” she says. “We are literally five minutes to the airport, so we get a lot of people who work at the airport. And we are five minutes to the subway, for people who want to commute downtown.”
Some west-end sites even offer something that most first-time buyers wouldn’t be able to afford downtown: waterfront access. At South Beach Condos + Lofts, by Amexon Development Corp., executive sales manager Jason Shiff says buyers love that they can live near the water without paying traditional downtown waterfront prices. Located at Park Lawn Road and Lake Shore Boulevard, South Beach units starts at 454 sq. ft. and at $188,000. “These first-time buyers don’t usually shop close to the waterfront, because it is out of their price range. But we are waterfront living — we’re not on top of the lake, but it’s a two-minute walk,” Mr. Shiff says.
Camrost-Felcorp’s California Condos also offers a chance to live close to the water. Located at Park Lawn and The Queensway, the developer’s newly redesigned suites are specifically geared to first-time buyers. There, one-bedroom units start at 455 sq. ft. and at $149,900 — an exceptionally good price. “Although you might have a smaller suite, you have full access to all the amenities in the complex; and California Condos provides up to 75,000 sq. ft. of amenity areas,” says Camrost-Felcorp president David Feldman, “The beauty of the condo lifestyle is you have all these amenities.”
Of course, there’s also homes for those buyers who’d prefer more interior space and fewer amenities. MintoUrban Communities has just that at its townhouse site Richgrove Village, located at Martin Grove Road and Eglinton Avenue. The site features 88 stacked two-storey townhouses, ranging from 1,000 to just over 1,400 sq. ft., and priced from the low $200,000s. The site largely appeals to buyers who are already familiar with the area, says Minto sales manager Katherine Milian: “These are people who’ve lived in the area and really love the area and want to stay in it,” she says.
In Mississauga, as well, many buyers feel that same loyalty to location, wanting to stay in a familiar community, close to family and friends. Some also just buy for the prices.
New suites at Absolute Condos, for instance, are sized from 455 sq. ft. and priced from $199,900. The Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario location is perfect for commuters, says Sharon Florian, sales and marketing manager for Fernbrook Homes, partner on the project with Cityzen Development Group. “It’s very quick to the highway, maybe 15 minutes to downtown, and it’s very close to Brampton or the airport if someone travels a lot,” she says, “It’s an ideal location if two people are commuting to different areas.”
At elle, Amacon’s project at Burnhamthorpe and Highway 10, Debbie Cosic, of In2ition, has also been welcoming the first-time buyer crowd. There, the developer has incentives especially geared towards those purchasers, including a 10% deposit plan, Haustique furniture packages and a “decorating allowance” of up to $10,000, which can go towards decor upgrades or closing costs. Suites at the site range in size from 600 sq. ft. and in price from $232,900. All of that, and the site is, in fact, close to downtown. Downtown Mississauga, that is.
“It’s a walk to city centre,” Ms. Cosic says. “They can walk to the theatres, the shopping, the restaurants. It’s a fantastic location.”
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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Young guns driving enviro-condo push
It seems it’s the developers – not buyers – who are gung-ho on green
By Terrence Belford – Globe and Mail
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story The Rich Boy, the narrator says the rich “are different from you and me.” Judging by the statistics, those differences are starkly outlined when it comes to embracing environmental concerns in new luxury condos.
“Green” may be great for mid-market buyers but not for the Greater Toronto Area’s affluent.
Urbanation Inc., which tracks LEED statistics, says that at the end of July, there were 36 buildings — 24 of them currently under construction — registered under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification program. Two major developers — Tridel and Minto — have pledged to construct all future projects according to LEED guidelines.
At the same time, Urbanation says 13 luxury projects were on sale. (It defines luxury as anything selling for more than $600 a square foot.) Jane Renwick, Urbanation’s executive vice-president, says two of them — 77 Charles West and the St. Thomas — are being built to LEED standards, while a third, the Huntington, will likely follow suit.
“We get our statistics from the Canadian Green Building Council and it lists those two for certain as LEED-registered. The Huntington … is from Tridel, which has pledged to do all its buildings under LEED,” she says, but the council had not notified her of it being registered at the time of the interview.
So, those facts and figures raise a few questions, such as: What is actually happening with green condos? How come the most expensive ones, which could easily afford the extra cost of building to LEED standards, are not doing it?
The answers may be surprising to some. First, it is developers driving the move to LEED and not any sort of buyer demand, industry experts say. Second, the leaders in the industry seem to be family owned companies in which the younger generation is now taking over the reins.
“For many in the housing industry, green is an issue whose time has come,” says Sam Crignano, a partner in Cityzen Development Group, which currently has both Pier 27 and the Shores in Oakville on the go. “There is greater awareness of the need to go green, especially among the younger generation; it is an issue they believe in personally.
“Buyers are not willing to pay more for it, but many developers are taking the initiative anyway. They are backing their beliefs with their money. In most cases, the technology is still in almost the experimental stage. But I do think that eventually it will be legislated as the standard for all new construction.”
As for luxury projects: The buyers tend to be men and women in their 50s or older and environmental concerns are not on their list of priorities. In addition, things like Energy Star-rated appliances, which consume about 40 per cent less energy, are simply not available in the high-end, large-sized models those buyers want in their new homes.
“The environment does not seem to be a priority for luxury suite buyers,” says Mark Cohen, senior vice-president at Condo Store Marketing Systems Inc.
“Where in mid-range buildings, buyers are deeply concerned about the impact of rising energy costs and as a result want Energy Star appliances and structural and mechanical systems that ensure energy efficiency, the high-end market doesn’t pay much attention to monthly maintenance fees,” Mr. Cohen says.
“Green is just not on the radar for most of them.”
High-end buyers want what they want, adds Veronika Belovich, director of sales and marketing at Bazis International Inc., developer of 1 Bloor, Emerald Park at Yonge and Sheppard, and the soon-to-be-launched Exhibit on Bloor Street, west of Avenue Road.
“They want gas ranges and large refrigerators,” she says. “Manufacturers do not make Energy Star models beyond 36 inches. They also want rare woods for flooring and non-renewable stones for flooring and countertops.
“This is their dream home and they want what they want.”
That being said, there is still great hope that green features and building practices will be the norm in all buildings in the future, says Andrea Kantelberg. Her company, Kantelberg Design Inc., not only specializes in interior design that is environmentally sensitive and health-enhancing but offers its own line of paints, wall coverings, flooring, carpeting, cabinetry and fabrics — all part of what it calls the AK Ecollection.
You can see her work at 1 Bloor, the U Condominiums on the grounds of St. Michael’s College, and the new Queen and Portland project.
“LEED is just a starting point,” she says. “In reality, it just builds on Ontario building codes. The next step is to create health-conscious buildings and suites. That means no more materials that off-gas; no more materials that don’t come from sustainable sources.
“LEED addresses cost savings; what we do builds on that and addresses all those health issues [raised] by today’s building materials. Health issues are fast rising on everyone’s priority list. It just makes sense that once LEED is entrenched, the focus will shift to healthy design.”
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960
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The strange house that Ma built
By John Bentley Mays – Globe and Mail
Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. This novel tall-building scheme, you may recall, was the winning entry earlier this year in an international competition sponsored by Toronto-area developers Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Development Group. It kicked up a notable stir among architectural chatterers and other observers, and little wonder: In a suburb dotted by big, ordinary cereal-box apartment buildings, something this slinky and sexy was bound to be a hit.
Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Mr. Ma’s assertively cosmopolitan MAD Office is designing up a storm for various places in China, with much the same swing and verve its founder brought to Mississauga. The firm’s current focus tends to be institutional — a museum addition, cultural centres, an office-hotel complex and so on. But this year Mr. Ma is also scheduled to finish his first executed house: an unusual building that provides interesting (and also ominous) insights into this emerging architect’s imagination and design approach.
Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing, Rising House, as it’s called, is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters. Mr. Ma explained in a telephone interview that his idea in the design of Rising House was to reflect the rising and falling landscape of its mountainous neighbourhood, which is near the Great Wall. A river flowing by the building site called for unobstructed views from within the house, and the slope of the property also had to be acknowledged and incorporated into the design.
Mr. Ma’s response to the landscape is as bold as the Mississauga towers, but more two-fisted. The 2,700-square-foot Rising House is a massive piece of concrete poured in place. It features a broad sculptural movement from a one-storey element (the entryway and sheltered parking area) up to the main body of the house, which stands two storeys tall on a moulded concrete platform. In a deliberate homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s classic Farnsworth House — the original of all the much-hated and much-loved glass boxes in American architecture for the last 50 years — Mr. Ma has made the downstairs part of Rising House (like the Farnsworth House) a unified, continuous doughnut of space flowing without interruption around a central core, which is dedicated to the kitchen. When completed, this spacious room will be enclosed (again like the Farnsworth House) by expanses of glass, hung ceiling to floor. Surely no river has ever gotten a more generous overlook than the one given by Mr. Ma to the stream that flows by Rising House.
Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing is Rising House, as it’s called, a Ma designed building that is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters.
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Chinese architect Yansong Ma is known to Canadians for one project: his curvaceous Absolute condominium towers, slated to start going up soon in downtown Mississauga. Now under construction in a thickly built-up residential area some 90 minutes by car north of Beijing is Rising House, as it’s called, a Ma designed building that is to be the weekend home for an information technology specialist, his wife and their two daughters.
On the upper level, the concrete mass is articulated, conventionally, into four bedrooms and a family room. Less conventional is the addition of a narrow swimming pool on this upper level. An operable skylight allows this pool to be open to the sky or roofed, as the residents wish. But this pool is for more than just swimming. A strip window in its side, below surface level, scatters filtered sunlight into the large interior below, creating a shimmer on ceiling, walls and floor that repeats the sparkle of sunshine on the river outside. When the light is right, this play with illumination should give the concrete dwelling the sense of a grotto: looming and faintly mysterious, radiant with flickers and flashes.
When the light is less than right, Mr. Ma’s house may well seem somewhat obtuse. Boosting aloft the ponderous weight of the second storey, and making it seem to float on walls of glass, he has kept the building from becoming glowering and bunker-like. Yet it is hard not to see in the sloping profile of Rising House an expressway ramp, or the ramps between floors in a parking garage — tough, blue-collar concrete forms, in other words, that are considerably less lyrical than the landscape Mr. Ma intends them to look like. Quite apart from these unfortunate allusions, there is an abiding aesthetic problem with the house: the too-drastic contrast between the weightiness of all that concrete poured into one large crouching form, and the almost dainty delicacy of the glass wall enclosing the bottom storey. Mr. Ma loves to make strong gestures, as we have learned from the formal play of the Absolute towers — but in Rising House he has almost certainly hit the ground too hard.
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