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Downtown Victoria's 367-stall Broughton Square Parkade pitched for redev into rental tower

https://victoria.citified.ca/news/downtown-victoria-s-367-stall-broughton-square-parkade-pitched-for-redev-into-rental-tower/

Citified profile: https://victoria.citified.ca/rentals/617-broughton-street/

Prime location. Just shows you how weak the condo market is that the project is rentals

Looks like Citified is having some server issues today.

And yes indeed, the condo market is as dead as it can possibly get, from a pre-sale perspective. Zero, and I do mean zero, interest from the development community. The problem is, condos require immediate outlay of investment, with an immediate impact on that investment. Rentals are generational pay-back, so the market is banking on Victoria fixing what ails it by 2060, hopefully well before then. So the money is flowing into rentals.

Ultimately, long term, this is not good.

From the article:

Downtown Victoria's recent phase of residential construction has delivered rental homes almost exclusively. The condominium sector has no pre-sale opportunities currently on the market, a first in about two decades, as developers hone in on investment-safe strong demand for rental housing as the city centre ownership market (both re-sale and pre-sale) struggles to find its footing.

The industry cites challenges with social problems in the downtown area, a ban on short-term rentals, provincial changes to secondary home and investment property regulations and taxes, and foreign buyer taxes, as contributing impediments to a thriving condominium market. In turn, no new supply is on the horizon for Victoria's city centre. Elsewhere in the Capital, condominium pre-sales are launching and continue to see buyer uptake.

Rentals are essentially 100% (and likely more after a bit of creative accounting) financed by the government which is why they are getting built.