If you think about it,... these retail "investors" are paying more than 1% in property tax,... add in maintenance fees,... now this 2.7% final closing fee,..... that pretty much add up to 4% for the year,.... but those are all sunk costs. Now if propery value went up by 4%, great, but they only see that 4% increase in property value if they sell their units,.... and as you know, many of tried to sell their retail units and have given up,... so they open their own stores to cut their lost.
In post# 1686 I posted the various breakdown in fees (Section 37, parks, arts, subway entrance, etc,...) - it does NOT include the $25,000 per (condo) unit development fee.
http://urbantoronto.ca/forum/thread...-rosario-varacalli.4829/page-113#post-1070093
The real problem is EmeraldPark sold pre-construction in 2008 and 2009,.... but didn't get city approval (Final Report) until early 2010 - at which time fees like Section 37 community benefit were determined. But since then, the developer never notified buyers of these fees,... they were content to pay these fees and collect the interest on them,.... now 6 years later, developer wants to collect,.... with interest!!!
Now consider the total cost of all the fees I mentioned from those city planning reports,... divide that by the sum of (about 583 residential condo units + 60 office condo units + about 75 retail units),.... then compare that to the 16k-17k final closing fee,... yeah, that's a lot of interest!
Anyways,... For the residential side, the 3 newly appointed directors on the residential condo board does includes a lawyer,.... I'm just saying, there's probably a very good reason why the residents feel they needed to elect a lawyer onto their board of directors!
Anyways,.... at the beginning of the year when residential units had final closing, most were complaining of the unexpected 16k they owed. Now consider that residential condo units are typically more expensive than most of the retail units,... and now retail units are each paying 17k regardless of size? Huh? Most retail units costed about quarter million,.... the Yonge frontage units costed about a million,.... the little food court units maybe $200,000. Some have combined multiple units,.... but now every retail owner must pay the same $17k???? Even Metro who owns the entire 2nd floor????
Do we even know if Metro is still in EmeraldPark???? In early 2015 (during construction) there was Committee of Adjustment meeting that considered various changes to EmeraldPark retail space for the benefit of Metro - hallways, loading docks, freight elevators that kind of stuff,.... but as far as I know, EmeraldPark was supposed to deliver the 2nd floor retail space to Metro last Fall, Metro was already looking to bail out of EmeraldPark,.... so did EmeraldPark actually deliver on time or did Metro find a loophole to bail,..... remember the developer plumbers and contractors were using the supermarket space as late as last month as a work and staging area. Huh? If it was Metro's at that time why would the developer be able to use it??? Anyways, if Metro really bailed and developer is stuck with it,.... who's paying the final closing fees for the 2nd floor retail space,.... take a guess,....
