Peter Wall (property Developer) - Vancouver Real Estate

Vancouver Real Estate

Wall owes his success not only to hard work and an ability to anticipate the market but to the favourable economic and social conditions of Vancouver's 1990s and 2000s real-estate boom. In his book City of Glass (2000), local novelist Douglas Coupland claims that real estate is "Vancouver's biggest sport and is disturbingly central to the city's psyche. Real estate agents are local celebs of sorts".

In the early 1980s, the city experienced an economic recession as British Columbia's traditionally dominant lumber industry struggled. The most obvious consequence of the recession was a marked fall in property values. In the next decade, however, Vancouver became less dependent on the economic fortunes of the rest of the province, and real-estate values held firm in the city even in 1991 when forest industries made record losses. During the seven years at the turn of the 1990s, Vancouver's economy grew faster than that of all but three other North American cities. According to cultural critic Paul Delany, writing in 1994, this success "may be credited to its relatively vital and efficient downtown core".

As Vancouver's economy continued to develop independently of its interior, the city also prospered from its location on the Pacific Rim. In particular, the 1990s saw an influx of immigrants and capital from Hong Kong in the lead-up to the colony's handover in 1997 from the British to the Chinese. As The New York Times noted in 1997, panic after the Tiananmen Square killings of 1989 "sent many Hong Kong families packing. They became rich overnight when they sold tiny apartments in Hong Kong for well over $1 million". Arriving in Canada, these wealthy immigrants in turn triggered "sky high real estate prices" in their new host city. Vancouver architect Ron Yuen believes that they "also brought with them a strong sense of the economic value of land, a sense that has since been developed by local residents who buy condo units before buildings are constructed".

If the first two elements in Vancouver's late-20th-century transformation were the influx from Hong Kong and a dense downtown core that the city was interested in further developing, the third was what social planner Baldwin Wong called "a combination of developers’ expertise and the injection of new capital into the market". This was where Wall and others came to the fore in leading the residential development of the downtown peninsula. With mountains to the north and ocean to the west, there was, in the words of The Globe and Mail, "nowhere to go but up".