The United Bldg. Condos – Live Webinar Replay
The United Bldg. – Register for First Access
On Thursday March 21, our team hosted a live webinar attended by hundreds of guests to learn about the exciting new condominium at University & Dundas – The United Bldg. Condos.
As Platinum Agents for United, our team has early access to some information ahead of the launch (March 27th) that we shared with our clients.
On the call we discussed:
- The importance of investing in a new condo on day 1
- Real Life example of prices increasing after the initial platinum launch
- A behind the scenes look at how the TalkCondo team tracks price growth for new condo suites
- Why we believe Toronto is currently experiencing incredible growth (and why we believe it will be sustained)
- What makes United an incredible condominium investment
- Some early details on the project, including a look at the floor plate
- How you can be one of the first to invest at United
- And much more!
Transcript
Speaker 1: Hey, good evening everybody. Just giving everyone a heads up, we’re just gonna give it a minute or two before we get started. Let a few more people join and then we’re gonna get started as soon as I’m seeing a lot of people joining right now. So, give it a minute or so and then we’ll get started.
Speaker 1: It’s nice to see a few familiar faces on the call. Familiar names, I’m seeing some of our great past clients. Andrew, nice to see you on there. Nick, thanks for joining us tonight. Hey Ricky. Yep, we’re just gonna give it another 30 seconds and then we’re gonna get started.
Speaker 1: Alright, good evening everybody. I wanna thank everybody for taking the time to join us and for a special early look at the United Building at the University in Dundas. It really is one of the most exciting condominium projects of the year and we’re excited to be involved in this one and to share some early information with you.
Speaker 1: Tonight we’re gonna try our best to educate you on why we think that this is gonna be a very special project and talk about how you can be one of the first to invest in this condominium. We are gonna go through a lot of information tonight and we’re gonna try and wrap the webinar up in about half an hour but just in case you do miss something or wanna go back on anything, you will be receiving a copy of the slides this evening as well as a copy, a video recording of the webinar.
Speaker 1: Just to introduce myself for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Roy Bhandari and I am the co-founder of talkcondo.com and I’m a broker of record at Sage Talk Condo Brokerage. Our team, we specialize in helping buyers get into high demand, new condo launches just like this one. Before we go any further, on the right side of your screen you should have a little box that looks something like this. If you have any questions as we go through the presentation, feel free to ask the questions using the box there. I’m not going to be doing the live Q&A tonight, it ends up making the webinar run very very long. What we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna take all the questions and we’ll get back to you one on one by email or phone, depending on how you like to be communicated with. So just fill in your questions as we go and we’ll definitely get back to you.
Speaker 1: For this condominium project we often do video interviews and for this one, we got a chance to sit down with Barb [Lawler 00:04:30] who is the CEO and President of Baker Real Estate. She gave us some really awesome insights into this project and for those of you who don’t know, Baker Real Estate is one of the largest new condominium sales and marketing companies and they handle almost 25 percent of new condo sales year in and year out and they work with some of the biggest builders and they’ve got some really unique insights into the market and unique insights into the project. So, it was a lot of fun interviewing Barbara and we recommend, definitely checking that video out.
Speaker 1: So, this evening, we’re obviously gonna talk about the united condos at the University of Dundas but we do wanna highlight that this is a preview webinar. This condominium has not yet launched and it will not launch until next Wednesday, March the 27th. That will be the first day that we get the full release of floor plans and pricing. We typically run these pre-launch webinars for condos that are very very high in demand and the reason is because it helps you get some key information on a condo project ahead of time so that you’re prepared for the launch.
Speaker 1: In new condos like this where demand is usually higher than supply, we find that buyers who have prepped in advance typically have the most success in securing the suites that they want. So here’s a couple of reasons that we’re giving you this information a week ahead of time. The first is obviously that the early demand for this condominium has been very high. We come to expect this, especially for condo launches in the downtown core, in these triple A locations. The second reason and probably the most important reason for us running this webinar a week before the condo launch is, and this is something I’ve alluded to earlier, but it’s because we really believe that buyers who are well prepared before the project actually launches are the ones that are gonna be the best placed to secure their suites.
Speaker 1: So hopefully tonight, we’re gonna go through a lot of information but it gets you one step closer. But here’s what not to expect tonight. The condominium has not launched so we don’t have the pricing for this condominium yet. We don’t have some of the specifics like the maintenance fees and we don’t have the deposit structure. So, we’re not gonna touch on any one of those three things. But here’s what we will cover. We’re gonna talk about the importance of working with platinum brokers and front of line agents and we’re gonna show you how that plays out in the real world. I wanna touch on why pre-construction condos, as an investment vehicle, why we continue to invest in pre-construction condos, why our clients, we’re seeing more and more multiple time investors now who’ve bought one in the past, they’re now buying two and three and four, and why they’re doing that. Why people like this investment vehicle.
Speaker 1: Now we’re gonna talk about what the hell is happening in Toronto. In a time when markets are dropping on the suburbs slowing down. We’re seeing Toronto have the opposite effect where demand is still very high and we wanna talk about some of the reasons we believe that is and why we believe that’s gonna be sustained moving forward. We’re obviously gonna talk about this condominium project, the United, and then we’re gonna talk about how you’re able to buy and some key dates that you need to be aware of.
Speaker 1: So let’s start by talking about working with the right agent and working with platinum agents, especially on new condo launches. Now, we know there’s a lot of people on this call that are familiar with this, we do have some new investors on the call as well so we do wanna sort of highlight some of this. It will be a nice refresher for some of those of you that are already aware of how this plays out but we’re gonna go through this relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: So our team, we’ve been pre-construction condo brokers, me and myself and my brother Amit, for the last 10 years. We operate one of the largest new condo portals on the Internet which is talkcondo.com. We have front of line access to some of the biggest builders in Toronto and one of the unique things that we do to highlight these powerful relationships is that we interview these developers and sales managers and architects that we otherwise would have, we just wouldn’t have access to these people if we didn’t have that kind of front of line access. We love doing these interviews because it gives us and it gives our clients a really unique perspective on these condo projects.
Speaker 1: For this project, specifically, the developers flew out myself and 12 other platinum brokers to New York to introduce this project and to give us a first look at this project and again, this is just highlighting that developers, they don’t just fly out any brokers. They fly out the platinum brokers to these kinds of events and we were very very fortunate here. This is a picture of myself, along with the other brokers and in the middle there is Jeff Clarke, who is the sales manager for The United. So, we just wanted to highlight that. For this project, we got to interview the CEO and President of Baker Real Estate who again, is not a person that the average agent would have access to. Having her share her vision of the project was great and really exciting.
Speaker 1: So, we’ve talked about the credentials but the main reason I wanna do that is because it’s becoming so important to be working with the agents who have these front of line access and who are these day one agents. We call them platinum agents or day one agents or whatever you wanna call them. But the importance of this is how it plays out in the real world and again, we understand that a lot of people know how this plays out but we’re hoping we’ve got some examples here that some people haven’t seen so we’re just gonna go through this very quickly.
Speaker 1: If you’re not familiar with what a typical condo launch looks like, there’s typically five launches. This doesn’t play out for every single condominium but it plays out for most condominiums and this is a pretty typical way that a condominium developer will launch their project.
Speaker 1: The first launch is when the project developer gets his pricing and his floor plans. He’ll go to his direct family and friends. There may not be an event here but they may go to their brother or their aunt or their son or whatever it is and if they wanna buy a unit, they’re gonna get the best pricing, obviously. The first opportunity for an investor to buy is what’s called the “platinum launch”. This is an industry term, this is when you get the best prices, you get the best incentives, you get the best suite selection because most of the building is available right now but this is the best time that you wanna be investing in a new condominium. Once they start launching to the other agents, the VIP agents, what tends to happen is they increase the price, they remove incentives and what ends up happening is you’re paying more for the leftover units. And as we go through the cycle you’ll see, on this model, as you go through the stages, you’re gonna be paying more and more.
Speaker 1: Of course, with talkcondo and why we emphasize this so much is we do wanna get our clients in on day one pricing. We wanted to show some real life examples of this and like I said, a lot of people know how this plays out but what they don’t know is how we track it internally. In the next couple of slides, we’ve never shown anybody and that’s how we track price changes internally for new condominiums. This is a system that we’ve invested countless hours, countless energy. We’ve got our dollars behind it. And the reason we do this, and I’m gonna show you what it looks like but we track the price changes of every single condominium on a floor plan level. So we know which floor plans have increased when.
Speaker 1: So, and I’m gonna show you this example. I’m gonna show you a lot of examples of this so this is what the backend system of ours looks like. This is a condo that launched at the back end of last year. If you look at the bottom there, there’s a little section called price history. This is the price history of this floor plan. Now this data is all collected manually. This is talkcondo data. This is not some industry data that we tap into. The reason we collect this data is so that when we sit down with clients and when we emphasize the importance of buying day one, we can back it up with real data.
Speaker 1: So this is an example of a condominium that launched at the back end of last year. We can see here, that this is the day one pricing. In this example, it’s 662,000 to buy this two bedroom unit. And then on November the 11th, which is about two weeks later, there was a 51,000 dollar increase for this unit. Exact same unit, the only difference here is that you’re buying not on day one, you’re buying on day two or the VIP launch. And then if you look again here, we see that this particular unit, before it was tagged sold out, there was one more price increase which jumped from 735,000 on December the 5th. If you see this, you see that the pricing escalation of this particular unit was huge so just missing that bulk buy for a few weeks, you’re paying over 10 percent more. Much more than 10 percent more, for the same unit.
Speaker 1: I did wanna show one more example of this. This is a one bedroom unit that launched just a month ago. Here we see the day one pricing, this is a platinum price. And then two weeks later, they did the VIP launch and you can see here, there was a 27,000 dollar increase for the exact same suite. And again, this is just highlighting the importance. And I do wanna show one more example, not to harp on this too much but the reason I wanna show this next example is because –
Speaker 1: So this is an example of a project that launched in 2015. So we don’t just have this data in our system for something that’s just launched a month ago, or two months or three months ago. We actually have this data going back years and years and years. So, for projects that have gone through the entire life cycle, we can see what that looks like and this is actually a project called One [inaudible 00:14:39] which launched many many years ago. This is the pricing of the one bedroom. We can see here that back then when the market wasn’t moving as aggressively as it has been, we can see that there was a big price jump of 73,000 dollars a few months after day one.
Speaker 1: Now, the reason I want to bring this up is that our sample size for data on this importance of buying day one is not small. We go back years and years and we see this trend time and time and time again. So, this is something that’s really important and it’s a very important concept to understand.
Speaker 1: So, the next one we wanna talk about is pre-construction condos as an investment vehicle. Now, we talk a lot about the concept of getting wealthy using other people’s money. The idea behind leveraging your money to grow your wealth is one of the biggest reasons that we believe new condos is such an incredible, incredible investment vehicle. And anybody who’s gotten wealthy by investing in real estate will understand this, it’s a fundamental. I’m not reinventing the wheel here but I do just wanna highlight this because I think it’s very very unique.
Speaker 1: So, here’s an example of what, and I’m gonna break this chart down and point to what you need to be paying attention to. But what I want to show here is, under the assumption that you’ve purchased a condominium for 600,000 dollars. What that equity growth would look like over the lifetime of construction. So what’s unique about new condos is that on a 600,000 dollar purchase, the equity that you’re required to put up during construction is only 20 percent. Now this is unique because you’re buying an appreciating asset, with pennies on the dollar and that balance, that 480,000, that 80 percent of the 600,000, you’re not paying interest on it, you’re not paying your down, that’s being covered by the developer, at no cost to you, for the duration of construction. And that’s what makes this vehicle so, so, so unique.
Speaker 1: And again, I think a lot of people who do this know that they’re doing this but to see it spelled out I think really, really helps emphasize what I’m talking about. We actually call this process “wealth hacking” because you’re able to buy that appreciating asset, with pennies on the dollar. So, in this example, we see that on a 600,000 purchase, your equity is 120,000. That’s your investment. And what we did was, we showed the value of what that condominium would look like by 2025. And we’re using 2025 here because that is the date that United will be completed.
Speaker 1: So, we used an annual growth rate of 5 percent and I wanna just pause on 5 percent for one second because 5 percent is a very, very, very conservative number for the growth, the market growth that we’re anticipating over the next few years. So going back five years, if we look at the base corridor, this prime corridor of real estate, where United is located, the five year growth here was 67.9 percent. If you annualize that, just for simplicity and I understand that annualizing doesn’t quite work by just chopping it by five. But just for simplicity and just to keep this model working, if you annualize that, the growth is 13.58 percent per year.
Speaker 1: And to be conservative, we used five percent per year. And at five percent a year, the property value will grow from 600,000 and if you do it five percent, you’ll see that the value grows to, the equity growth grows to 204,000 and a return on equity of 170 percent. And that’s using that very very conservative, five percent per year growth rate.
Speaker 1: Another number that I wanna highlight here, and this is such an important number, is this one right here. So, if the market only grows at 5 percent a year, because you’ve only put down the 20 percent, in this situation, it only takes you four years to double your equity. In this case, by the end of year four, your equity has grown from 120,000, it’s grown by an additional 129,000 for a total equity of 107 percent. Just to re-emphasize what this would look like if we said, like I said, the percentage of growth in this pocket, the base corridor, was between 13 and 14 percent and I said, “Let’s say over the next five years, let’s chop that number in half and let’s make the annual growth 7 percent”, what would that look like?
Speaker 1: You can start to see these models and how they show that growth and why do we believe this is a form of wealth hacking? You can see that by that time, by the time you get your keys, your equity has grown from 120,000, it’s grown an additional 300,000 which is a 250 percent increase in just six years.
Speaker 1: So one of the rules that I wanted to talk about is the rule of 72. The rule of 72, if you’re not familiar with this investment rule, is that if you take 72, you divide it by your investment percentage, it will tell you how long it takes for an investment to double. So for example, if you have return of investment of 10 percent per year, you’d take your 72, you would divide it by 10 and it will tell you it takes 7.2 years to double. Now what we wanted to do is let’s say you bought a condo but you have this 120,000 and you have a few different options of how to invest that money.
Speaker 1: The first option is you can leave it in a bank. And if you leave it in a savings account, you’re gonna earn a percent a year using that rule of 72, it’s gonna take 72 divided by what, 72 years for that 120,000 dollars to turn into 240,000 dollars. If you got a [GIC 00:21:19] and you play the role of some short term GIC’s and Move the money around just for arguments sake and consistency, you’ve got a consistent three and a half percent growth on that every single year, it would take you 20 years for that 120,000 to turn into 240,000.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to play the stock market, and we looked at the TSX index and if you hit the benchmarks and invested in the TSX [inaudible 00:21:46] which returned just under seven percent per year, over the last five years. It would take just over 10 years for you to double that money. It’s gonna take you 10 years to double 120,000 into 240,000.
Speaker 1: If you go back to that previous slide, if the condo market only grows at five percent, it takes you just four years to grow that money. So we really believe in this investment vehicle for growing wealth. It’s such a unique one, we call it wealth hacking. I think if you pick the right projects, it’s such a powerful way for your money to work for you.
Speaker 1: So next we want to talk a little bit about what the hell is happening in Toronto. So, the reason we wanted to talk about this is because it’s important to understand what’s happening in our city because ultimately, that is what you’re investing in. You really have to believe in what’s going on in Toronto. And while some of the sub markets and the low-rise housing has suffered, it has flat-lined and the demand has dropped, the opposite is happening in Toronto where demand remains strong and we’re still seeing prices escalate and we’re still seeing rents escalate. So we wanna talk a little bit about why that’s happening. We have some ideas about why we think that is going on and we wanna share that with you.
Speaker 1: So, starting with some basics, immigration is still the primary growth factor for the Toronto market. We know that approximately 300,000 people move to Canada every year, of which about 30 percent move to Toronto which makes it approximately 100,000 people are moving to the GTA and the Toronto area every single year. Which means over the next two years we’re gonna see 200,000 and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: We’re also in this unique time where we’ve got this really unique situation. We call it a perfect storm and we’re gonna talk about what that means. Vacancy rates, we know, are already below one percent. So, we know that what’s built in Toronto right now, it’s already occupied, there’s not much more. We don’t have an abundance of empty condominiums and what’s happened is that over the last few years, the ONB, the change from ONB has been huge. What we’re talking about here is the reason that the demand, the supply side is being effected.
Speaker 1: So in 2008, the ONB was replaced and what I’m not gonna spend a lot of time talking about what the ONB is, but essentially, the ONB was the mechanism which builders used to get their condominiums approved. And under the old system, I’ve talked to countless builders and what they’ve told me is that under the old system, from the time they make their application, it can take 12 to 18 months to get an approval in place.
Speaker 1: Under the new system, since they removed ONB, that time can double and in fact in some places, take up to three years to get an approval in place. And I don’t think we’ve really seen the effects of this yet but we are gonna see the effects of this in the next 12, 24, 36 months because what we’re starting to see is all those sites that were purchased that should be coming to market this year, are not gonna be coming to the market for a year from now or two years from now. And we’re already feeling that on the ground level because normally we see a lot more new condo launches in the downtown core, whereas this year, it’s been very limited.
Speaker 1: Looking forward, it’s going to be very limited because all the sites that have been tied up were just not getting the approvals for them in time. So we’ve got this situation where the supply is actually being shrunk and in the next few slides I’m actually gonna show you why demand is actually going up at an all time high.
Speaker 1: So one of the biggest growth spurts that we’ve seen in Toronto over the last few years is the tech industry. Now, sometimes when this stuff is happening in your own backyard, it’s too close to see what is actually going on. So, in this graph, what I wanted to show here was the amount of tech jobs that were added in Toronto, this is in 2017. But Toronto was the number one city for new tech jobs being added. If you look at the numbers, Toronto added more tech jobs than the next four combined and you can see Seattle, New York, Washington and the Bay Area. You add those all together and they still added less new tech jobs than Toronto.
Speaker 1: There’s countless articles out there that talk about this phenomenon that’s going on. Some of the companies that are coming into Toronto, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Intel, Pinterest, Shopify, [N Videa 00:27:13] the list goes on. Thales, [inaudible 00:27:15] AMD and what we’re also seeing is not just companies coming in brand new that have never been in the GTA but also we’re seeing this unique situation where companies are relocating their suburb head office and moving them to the downtown core because they want to be closer to the incredible new labor force that’s in Toronto. They want to be close to all that.
Speaker 1: So we’re seeing this relocation and that’s happened recently with Microsoft [inaudible 00:27:44]. So this is just a quick run down of what we’ve already talked about. But as we started to look at this, what became clear was that, and we’re always looking at Toronto versus other cities and saying, are we New York, are we this? We’re always trying to grow towards being other cities but what we’re starting to see is a lot of parallels with San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Now when we start looking at San Francisco, we saw this quote in the Business Insider. “This is a direct correlation between these price hikes that they experience in San Francisco and the tech industries ever expanding presence in the Silicone Valley. The tech behemoth like Google, Facebook, Apple, they all operate out of the Bay Area and recruit a lofty volume of high earning workers that need to find living quarters here. The workers high salaries combined with the city’s already dwindling house supply has spawned an affordability crisis within the real estate market, [inaudible 00:28:51] to an astronomical degree”. And this rings so true to what is starting to happen in Toronto. We have this situation where the dwindling supply is happening at the same time that all these tech giants are coming into the city at a very rapid rate.
Speaker 1: This is another quote that we’ve pulled from the articles in the Toronto Star, it was Doug Palmer, the [inaudible 00:29:19] regional director of commercial banking that talked about this. So he said there’s roughly 241,000 tech jobs in the GTA, making this the fourth largest tech sub in North America and that’s no small deal and it’s also the fastest growing. That’s the key line here, the fastest growing. A relatively open immigration policy has helped attract tech talent to the GTA that could otherwise have ended up in Silicone Valley, Seattle and D.C.
Speaker 1: So again, this is just a quick slide showing some of those companies that have come into Toronto and just to give you an idea of the size of the investment that these companies are making. They’re huge. Microsoft just announced a 570 million dollar investment, bringing 500 new full-time jobs. Uber is launching a new engineering hub in Toronto for it’s RND Center for self-driving cars with a 200 million dollar investment. Shopify has announced a 500 million dollar investment and they’re gonna open their new head office on King Street. So these numbers are huge and they continue to come at a very rapid rate.
Speaker 1: The other thing that we looked at, we said, okay, let’s isolate Toronto as a tech hub and say that this is a growing trend that we’re seeing. What we wanted to see was what kind of impact has this had on other cities that are known as tech hubs? And what we saw was that the rents for these cities that are identified as tech hubs, and we’re gonna outline what those cities are in a minute. But the growth in rents was almost three times bigger than in these cities that were not considered to be tech hubs.
Speaker 1: So when we compare the prices and the rents of where we’re at today, compared to these other big cities that are considered to be tech hubs, and this answers the question of how far can Toronto go? You would hear it all the time, I hear it all the time and if I hear it I’m sure everybody hears it. The rents are too high, nobody can afford these rents. But when you really look at the data and look at this and say, “Where does Toronto sit?” You can start to see that there’s a lot of room to grow. So these are the monthly average rents in 2018 for San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C, Seattle and Toronto. The average rent for Toronto was 2,300 and I do need to confirm that these numbers have all been converted to Canadian dollars already. You don’t need to do that conversion again. But you start to see the rents in Toronto are 50 percent of what they are in San Francisco. And there’s so much room to grow in our city.
Speaker 1: So this was an important piece because I wanna highlight that Toronto is in a very unique time right now where we’re gonna start to see this constrained supply at the same time we’re seeing this enormous demand start to pick up. Commercial spaces are being built to bring these companies in because we don’t have enough commercial space now. So that’s the next wave that we’re seeing. We are seeing these commercial buildings being built. These brand new, state of the art, so that we can house more of these commercial companies, these tech companies. So we’re in a really unique time and you can quickly see why we’re so [inaudible 00:32:37] on this market and why we feel that we continue to invest in the city. So its a really exciting time for Toronto.
Speaker 1: So next, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re all here to learn about and that’s the United building. So the most obvious reason why there’s a lot of excitement around this condominium is the location. It really is a true, triple A, really offered location and it’s got direct access to the subway. So there’s a lot about what makes this location very special. It’s located on the University of Dundas which you can see on the map here and universities are interesting [inaudible 00:33:20] because it’s got a road, it’s got the subway underneath it but it doesn’t have a lot of residential condominiums. In fact, most of the land here is designated for other uses. For commercial, for the arts, for the culture and the last condominium you could buy with a university address was a residence of 488 university which launched five years ago.
Speaker 1: The other popular condominium on University Avenue is the Shangri-La residences but we also wanted to highlight some of the things that really make university Avenue special and unique. These are the things that as investors, we should be hooking onto.
Speaker 1: So we are in close proximity to five major hospitals. Toronto General, Mount Sinai, the hospital for sick kids, these are at your doorstep. We’ve got the Princess Margaret Cancer Center, we’ve got the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. This proximity to the medical center is so unique. We’re in a situation where this tenant pool or potential buyer pool are a set of people that need to be close to work, they work long shifts, they work midnight shifts, they’re on call. They need to be close to work so being this close to this much world-class medical is just incredible.
Speaker 1: On top of that, we’re very close to things like the Ontario Power Generation Building, the Mars Discovery Center, The Legislative Assembly Hall of Ontario, [Osgard Hall 00:35:00] and then we’ve got the university which of course is another huge tenant pool. We’ve got University of Toronto, we’ve got [Oakhead University 00:35:07] we’ve got [Ryson University 00:35:08] and we’re sort of triangled in between all of this. And as you start to see this picture built out, you start to see that you’re in the center of this, just world-class tenant pool of doctors and lawyers and university. So this is a very unique situation on a strip that is very rare to find residential condominiums.
Speaker 1: Next we want to talk about the development team and obviously in today’s pre-construction climate, buying from reputable builders and architects who can put these things together is more important than ever before. So the builder here is [Davport Incorporated 00:35:50] and they’re part of the H&R development family. The H&R development, the sister companies of Davport are companies like Linvest, H&R [inaudible 00:36:03] with a market cap of 6.2 billion dollars and 17 billion dollars in assets. Very popular residential builder called [Lang Terra 00:36:09] that you may have heard of. [Morlan Springs 00:36:12] [Alltree 00:36:14] so they’re part of this family of companies that does billions of dollars in real estate. And Davport, for the longest time, was the commercial and retail arm of this company. And over the years they’ve collected some of the most incredible sites and this is one of them, University in Dundas, as commercial buildings.
Speaker 1: Another location they own is 1 Eggleton East, which is the South-East corner, the CICB Building and Young Eggleton. They own land, the office building above the Davisville subway station so they’ve amassed over 90 commercial properties over the years and are now converting them into condominiums. And they’re doing so with the expertise of this rich history of H&R developments and all the sister companies that go along with it.
Speaker 1: We’re also gonna talk about B&H Architects. Now B&H Architects are actually very very unique because they’re one of the biggest architecture firms in the world. They do a lot of commercial and what you may not know about this architect is that they’ve had their hand on pretty much any of the major buildings in Toronto that you see, they’ve been involved in. Their portfolio is incredible. They were involved in the first Canadian place which is the tallest tower in Toronto which is the Beam Hotel, the white one in the middle. Eaton Center, RBC Tower, Ripples Aquarium, CN Tower and so much more. The Royal Ontario Museum, they were involved in the restoration of that which is gonna become important because of the restoration component of this building.
Speaker 1: So, we’re dealing with one of the biggest companies and this is just a small sample of some of the buildings that they worked on. I just wanted to highlight some of the ones that you may have been aware of within that skyline.
Speaker 1: So, United Building, the key features of this condominium is that it’s located on the North-East corner of University of Dundas. It’s got direct access to the subway. It’s a 55 storey tower with 9 storeys of commercial upgrade and I do wanna touch on that 9 storey of commercial. Now this is one of the most complex parts of this building because it’s that 9 storeys of commercial, it is a heritage building. And it’s one of the largest, heritage rich restorations in North America. Without this combination of developer and architect, I don’t know that this building gets built.
Speaker 1: It’s gonna require an incredible amount of expertise to dig down without the removal of this building while it’s being restored, so it’s really, really spectacular. In terms of the amenities, we’ve got world-class amenities across three floors, both exterior and interior. Here’s a small list, I’m not gonna read them all but on the interior we’ve got this stunning lobby with 24/7 concierge. We’ve got a party room, we’ve got the gym, we’ve got the library, we’ve got the theatre, the golf simulator, the video game room, the sports lounge, the saunas, the pool deck, There’s no amenity that’s missing in the United.
Speaker 1: Here’s a quick look at the lobby. We always look at the lobby of a building, it’s the first feeling that you get when you walk into a building. And more and more builders are putting a lot of emphasis on the quality of the lobby. Here’s just a shot of some of the outdoor terrace space. This is on the tenth floor which will be on the roof of the commercial space. Again, this goes back to what we talked about before. A typical build for a new condo is about 4 years but here we’ve got 6 years of development construction time and because this is such as complicated building, we’re able to use this to our advantage.
Speaker 1: I talked about in the past where we use those leverage funds, the 20 percent down, the longer we have occupancy, the harder that 20 percent is working for you, where every single year, your deposits are being leveraged five to one and it gives us more time for those pennies on the dollar, to keep working hard for us. And we have a subset of clients that love this. They want the occupancy to be as long as possible so that their 20 percent can keep levering their investment up and up and up. So this is a great feature.
Speaker 1: So this is a look at the floor plate and I understand it’s quite messy. You probably can’t get a good look at what exactly is going on here but in the email that you’re gonna get tonight, you are gonna get a PDF of this, which means you can zoom into the floors a little bit more and you can see what each floor plan looks like. But this is an early look at what we’re expecting the floor plans to be. Like I said, everybody on the call will get a copy of this. The other thing is that it gives us an idea of the suite sizes.
Speaker 1: So without looking at the specific floor plans, we can see it’s a very square floor plate which results in a lot of very clean and straightforward floor plans. We can see that studios are gonna be at 300 square feet, even have one beds that range from 400 to 550 square feet. We’ve got these great one plus flexers where the sort of den area can be used as a flexible space for storage or for a kids room or whatever it is and they range from 550 to 650 square feet. Your two beds go from 600 to 700 square feet and a two bed plus flexers from 700 to 800 square feet and three bedrooms from 900 to 1400 square feet and then the three dens are 15 and up.
Speaker 1: So we’re gonna talk a little bit now about how you’re able to GTE a condominium at the United, we’re gonna talk about some key dates and the process of what that looks like. So next week, as I’ve already mentioned, on March 27th is the platinum VIP broker launch. That’s when our team is gonna go in and get the floor plans, get the prices and that’s when we’re gonna be in touch with you and in the coming days, we encourage you to reach out to us. If you’re on this call and you’re interested and you want more information on this condominium, reach out to us, send us an email, get on the phone with us, talk about some of the things that you’re looking for so that we know ahead of time and we can help coordinate all that. We’ll receive the floor plans and prices around noon and we should have all the assets ready to go for later in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: On March the 28th, the following day, this is when we’re gonna have our private VIP client event. This is when you can come down, you can meet with the team, we can go through the floor plans and prices in detail, we can give you our suggestions on the units that we think are great in this building and this is the day that you’ll be able to submit your suites at reservation forms in person. So we’ll be holding these meetings throughout the weekend, March 28 will be the first day and everybody on this call will get an invite to that.
Speaker 1: So like I said, between now and March the 27th, we want you to be as prepared as possible. If you have any questions or feel like we’ve missed anything on the webinar tonight, please reach out to us directly. You can use the chat box on the side, ask the questions, ask whatever questions you have, you all have our email addresses. If you’re on this call it means you’ve received our email to join the call so hit reply on the email and we’ll get back to every single person, one on one, over the coming days.
Speaker 1: So that’s everything we have for tonight. We wanna thank you immensely for joining us this evening and we cannot wait to work with you at United Condos.
