salsa
Senior Member
^This is what the west don lands should have looked like!
^This is what the west don lands should have looked like!
^This is what the west don lands should have looked like!
when the units start selling at $2,000 a square foot instead of $500, then you should expect that.
Well if you are denying a conspiracy, then why not allow ALL potential purchasers the opportunity to buy a parking space with any sized unit.
As it exists now (based on what you just wrote that the planning dept wants more parking than developers want) then it would make sense why developers (who's only goal is to make money) force purchasers to buy a larger unit in order to be able to also buy a parking spot. Developers make more profit on larger units. They make next to nothing on parking spaces.
RM may have some details wrong, but he's not far off in his thinking. You work with developers so of course you are going to deny the truth.
If developers offered parking for any sized unit, then I would think that things are fair. But developers claim that the reason is because people who buy smaller units don't have cars. That's BS. You need to live in a condo with limited parking to realize how desperate people are for a spot.
The reason is simple = there are no profits to be made on parking alone.
when the units start selling at $2,000 a square foot instead of $500, then you should expect that.
Oh my god. I shouldn't even dignify this with a response. Development is an extremely risky business, millions of dollars are spent before developers ever see a dime coming back (remember, deposits are help in trust by a lawyer) and market conditions can change at any time, which makes projects with 4-6 year time lines very risky. If there was not enough profit in the deal, a construction lender would never finance it and it would never get built anyway. So unless a developer had $100 million dollars to finance their own project, there is not going to be a condo with 300 units and 300 parking spaces. Developers are looking to make profit, just like every other business. Some developers care very much about how the project looks like Brad Lamb and Symmetry Developments, two of the developers we work with, but they need to make financial sense to ever get off the ground.
The bottom line is it costs a lot of money to go underground (and takes time and time = money), so developers charge a high fee for parking, simple as that. Parking is not the profit generating portion of the project. The spaces are not offered for the small units because small units sell quickly without parking and often sell to investors that don't want parking. The larger units are the toughest ones to sell, and often sell to end-users (not investors) that require a parking spot, so developers want to make sure they have spaces left over for these buyers.
In many projects with a lot of parking, the spaces are not selling. For most young buyers I have come across buying at $300,000 or $350,000 unit don't want to spend $65,000 on parking, don't want the expense of owning a car (ie payment, insurance, gas, traffic, etc) and are choosing to use public transit or utilize a car share program.
There is not conspiracy, no attempt to screw the little guy. Land is expensive, construction expensive, development charges expensive, sites are small and difficult to assemble, some times the only way to make a project work financially is to eliminate more parking, if suites continue to sell without parking, then developers will continue to offer more units with no parking.
Yeah yeah, lets keep coming up with excuses, so that Toronto continues to be mediocre at everything.
colour doesn't need $2000 a square foot, but the quality seen in the buildings posted does. You would likely be looking at over $500 a square foot to simply build a place like that, ignoring aprroval costs, land costs, profit margins, etc. Buildings with colour are certainly possible, just not the ones depicted.
?most of the buildings going up in Montreal