 in. This is our second webinar. I'm pretty excited to see the interest and the number of people who have come on today to learn about this pretty important piece of the puzzle in trying to increase the supply of affordable housing here in British Columbia. And I know that we also have other folks and colleagues joining us from across the country. Today's webinar, which is where housing costs come from, a developer's peak inside, I think really resonates as something that others are trying to get, you know, understand some of the pieces of the puzzle of creating affordable housing. So we should have a great webinar and really great speakers. I want to also thank and for an introduction from our colleagues from the Economic Development Division who've been working to help coordinate and provide some technical support to putting on these webinars in our three-part series. My name is Ginny Holden and I'm a manager within the Housing Policy Branch within the Office of Housing and Construction Standards. My main focus of my job is to be looking at affordable market housing. This webinar is truly a partnership, although ourselves within the provincial government are helping to provide some of the people power to putting them on. It really is a partnership between several agencies, including BC Housing, the BC Real Estate Association, the Canadian Home Builders Association, UBCM, the Urban Development Institute, and ourselves at the Peromance, which also includes ourselves at Housing, the Economic Development Division, but also the Ministry of Community Sports and Cultural Development. The goal really of this series is to help share information to a provincial audience, but also a national audience, and to support and encourage the creation of more affordable market housing options in the Peromance. We completely understand and know that in British Columbia, affordable market housing is a high priority for many communities, families, and individuals. And we really enjoy the webinar format because, as we know, we learn best from each other. In the past, our organization did a lot of publications and other sort of flat forms of communication, but we really find that the webinar technique allows people to chime in in real time and learn what I think is the best brass tax approaches to how to move forward on improving affordable housing in their community. We've planned three webinars. We've done one already. The first webinar in October sets the context for the series, but exploring the economic and other drivers that affect housing affordability. Today, we wanted to get an inside scoop from developers on and development consultants on the elements that contribute to the cost of building affordable housing and really take us through a preforma, which is the developer's guide to calculating cost of a project to see how different elements can make or break a project. We know that creating affordable housing is complex and involves many players. Communities are looking at creative and innovative ways to increase supply and also, most importantly, protect affordability. In January, we wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty of looking at secondary suites, what works and what doesn't. We will hear from two municipalities as they will share their successes and their setbacks and solutions to implementing their secondary suite policies. Before I kick off the webinar and introduce the speakers, I want to understand a little bit of those who joined us today. We have some poll questions and also get people involved in the webinar experience. Our first question is, how many people have joined us today? It gives us a better sense of, we can see how many people have logged on through the web interface, but we want to also get a better sense of how many people are joining you within a particular room across DC. Please use the actual slides to indicate your choice and not the feedback indicated on the right hand corner. Just right in front of you is the red, blue, yellow, or green slide. Thank you. Tally of this here seems to have settled in. The next question is really going to test some of your knowledge with the next question as to get to thinking about some of the material presented. From your understanding it's a buildable area. There's one for Thursday afternoon. It's the same as building efficiency. So we'll be touching on one of some of these topics in the presenter's material today. I wanted to introduce our first speakers, Susan Bearer and Jerry Mahalland. Jerry joined GP Rollo & Associates in 2004 and is a senior land economist. He provides experience of financial services to clients dealing with state planning and development services. He's joined by his colleague Justin Bearer. Justin is a planner real estate development analyst whose primary focus is the integration of market and financial analytics in land use planning and development policies. Justin is also a member of the Planning Institute of British Columbia. And with further ado I will pass the microphone over to Justin and Jerry. Thank you. I mean as we are presenting on where housing costs come from, specifically looking at market projects. So we thought we'd look at first in trying to think about, when we talk about affordable housing, how is affordability defined? When we're looking at a market project, typically how affordability is defined is by your ability to pay. And so your ability to pay is then formed by your income level, the lending criteria at the time and based on your personal credit record, and then the continuum of housing products that are available to you both new and in resale. So if all of those things fix what your housing spending capacity is, then what are the effects that dictate what the price of the new construction and new product that's on the market is? So we looked at identifying four primary components that go into what makes for the cost of housing. The first being land, the second being profit or return on investment for the developer. The third being hard costs and the fourth being soft costs or development costs. So I'm going to start by talking about the land aspect. And the first thing we want to consider here is simply where the site is located. So where is the site? And we need to consider this simply because we want to know in what market the price is affordable and that's going to dictate use and density. The price that a parcel of land will trade for in a market will be a function of where it is located, existing entitlements defined by the zoning, potential for future entitlements, i.e. what is the site designated for in the official plan, as well as perhaps slightly more opaque considerations like what has been happening in the market area to like parcels of land in terms of redesignation. And that brings us to the second point, which is land speculation. In any given market there is the potential for land prices to be bid up through speculation due to markets or shipping market conditions, upcoming improvements perhaps a new transit line or other infrastructure upgrades, and simply through changes in the community plan, the neighborhood plan. And this can lead to affordability issues especially where there are expectations from various parties over land value and community benefit. And finally we need to think about the types of lots that are available in the area. Are there preponderance of small lots, large lots, and how easy or difficult time consuming, cheap or expensive is it to assemble these lots to do a development. Both time and complexity can add significant cost to development which can be, which will trickle through to the end price. Now how a site is designated in the zone will impact the imputed land value as well as the uses and prices of housing that can be developed on the site. In theory the value should be tied to current entitlements as defined through zoning rather than future uses defined through official plans. Now in so far as OCP and NCP these should be the first indicators for a developer to determine potential uses for the site. And typically a developer can do one of four things when looking at a development opportunity. A developer can develop a site under current zoning assuming that the economics of doing so makes sense. The developer can rezone to the use to a use that is already designated in an official plan. He can rezone to a use not designated or he can simply do nothing and hold the property. And beyond general zoning requirements or beyond general zoning some of the details within the zoning bylaw can also impact the cost of development. Things like how density is defined is it defined on a per unit basis or on a per square foot basis. In the development industry generally the preference is to define it on a per square meter basis as this gives the developer more flexibility on what can be built in a given envelope as defined by floor space ratio. How fees are charged? Are they charged on a per door basis or on a per square foot basis? The form or the per door can be used to influence certain product types in a market over other. What are form and character requirements and what are the costs associated with meeting those things? So who owns the site? The ownership of a site can impact overall development costs and ultimately unit prices as different owners have different mandates or requirements for realizing value from their list. A private owner, a private land owner will typically seek to maximize profits however there is a continuum of course within the population of private developers there is a wide variety of housing types, forms, finishes and pricing come to market. A municipality by contrast can have more options. A municipality may have a piece of land that they want to dispose of to raise money but also there are other opportunities such as the opportunity to act as a developer the opportunity to partner with the private sector developer. The opportunity to partner with private sector non-profit developers and all of these can result in ultimately a market unit at a slightly lower price than under a typical development program. Institutional ownership if the owner of a piece of land is a large institution or perhaps a state based organization they may have in their mandate provision of housing at lower market prices and often they already own their list redeveloped with an imputed land value of zero possibly lower profit expectation and that ultimately trickles through to a lower price. Also consideration of development of First Nations land often because of the lease hold land tenure associated with it the price of units can be lower. We come now to our next key component in development costs which is profit or return on investment. So we look back again to who's developing the land. The questions will vary depending upon who the developer is and what sort of project they're developing and that is in some way to their measure of risk on the project. But typically when people are developing they are looking at either building and selling a product for housing or they're looking at building and holding a product for development. So build and sell, you're looking at developing apartments and condos, townhouses, single family and the focus there is getting a return measured as profit. So profit on cost, profit on revenues, some other measure of profit there versus a build and hold where a developer is building something that they are intending to hold as part of their investment portfolio. So it would be a rental project both commercial and residential and so there's a variety of different ways that developers will look at a return there whether it's an internal rate of return, a return on equity investment or any other number of measures for a long-term perspective. The key thing however is that in either case a private developer needs to realize a return on their investment that they feel is commensurate with their risk in order for them to consider pursuing a project. Without this return then the developer would not be interested in doing the project at all and building housing. So hard cost hard cost are probably the most important piece of the pro forma puzzle when it comes to private where it comes to market housing. And hard costs are costs associated with anything physical pretty much. Buying materials, excavation demolition, construction. And the first major hard cost to want to address is materials. Construction costs vary significantly by material use. Often the wood frame is about 25 to 50% cheaper than concrete but typically historically wood frame has been limited in terms of the density and height that can be developed. That's starting to change now as we're starting to see the emerging of technology and market for taller wood structures such as fixed story and up wood frame. One has been recently completed in the city of Richmond I believe. And some believe that we're starting to see the emergence of something new which is the wood high rise. 30 stories interesting TED talk by Michael Green that you may want to check out on this topic. 12 minutes long. Other hard costs the condition of a site can drive a host of other hard costs this can include environmental assessment and cleanup, soil reclamation possibly the need for site grading and topography. Topography of a site can either limit the development yield or it can possibly improve the development yield if it's graded in such a way that it allows for the creation of something that may not otherwise be economically feasible in an underground parking. On-site improvements. Things like fill to meet flood requirements and insurance requirements. Fill can be very costly especially if it's being trucked in from a great distance. Again remediation. This is costly in both dollars and possibly 15 times. If a lot is just sitting there the developer is still paying taxes on a lot as they're waiting for the site to be ready for development. Servicing the developer may need to pay for spending a pipe for any other services to the site. And we need to also think about what kind of amenities are being required and are being provided. And finally design. Building efficiency this is something that we always need to consider. The developer can only sell the usable area that is being developed. Something like a townhouse. Often the building efficiency is close to 100% most of what you build you're selling. For an apartment you can't sell the elevator shafts, the stairwells, and the hallways so your efficiency is lower. Finish. Higher quality equals higher cost. Sustainability features and designations. This can have significant costs. And while some of those costs can be paid back over time in terms of efficiency and savings, often the product periods are too long to resonate much in the marketplace. Some surveys have shown that consumers are likely to pay about a 3-5% premium for green features whereas the cost can often be 7-10% or higher in terms of premium. And last we come to our soft costs or development costs as a component of overall project costs for a housing development. So soft development costs consist of things like project management. So a consultant or internal person within the development company to see the project through from acquisition all the way through to the completion of the project and marketing. Architects and engineering fees. Other various fees for consulting consultants so things like doing market studies, financial analysis of your project, marketing the project and determining who you're selling to and what sort of scheme you should be using in terms of layout and design. And like appraisals, surveys, lawyers, accountants, insurance that you're having to pay on your project both on the land materials and for your workers in case something goes wrong. We also have costs to do with financing and interest and these are some of the key things that are affected by how long it takes to do the project. So you have land purchase financing. You have to purchase the land and then you carry the costs of that all the way through from the time you option or purchase until such time as you've finished marketing and selling the project or conversely if you're developing a rental project all the way through until you've actually fully paid that back to the bank. You also have interim financing that you have to pay for which is your construction financing. You're having to pay for all your materials and labor during the development period. You've also then got take out financing. If you haven't paid for the project in its entirety by the time you're finished building it, you have to get a take out mortgage, something similar to what we would do when we're buying a home. And then on top of that the bank is there saying well we also would like to see some additional fees and charges just for the luxury of you borrowing money from us. So all of those things add up to a lot and so when developers say that the clock is ticking and that it's costing the money every month that it's taking they're not lying. We also then come now to civic requirements and process. Some of which aren't directly soft costs but they do have spillover into this area. So things like parking requirements these add to the hard costs side of things but they are conditions and mandates that are usually set by the municipality or the planning department. Things like setbacks, height, view corridors, angles, other zoning related matters. These sorts of things add to the soft cost and to the hard cost of development. They may diminish the amount of space that is able to be built on a piece of property as well and they may also set how many units there may or may not be allowed on a piece of property too. Things like district energy can impact the cost of a project where it has additional high costs as Justin said green features often have high upfront costs and then long term savings and district energy would be a prime example of that as opposed to traditional methods whether it be electric or forced air. Property taxes being paid during construction and during holding the land all those things add up. We have planning and approvals time. The length of time it takes to get through is a big factor. Again we talked about the interest costs. Those are taking a long search. Same with their project management. And lastly we have civic fees. Things to do with rezoning, redesignation, building permits, development cost charges, civic and regional, and then amenity contributions. What are they? Will they apply to this particular project? How much are they? Are they negotiated? Are they a flat fee? Are they based on a percentage of the lift in land value? So all of those things are the components we looked at as being key parts of building a market project. Thank you. And we will pass it back to our hosts. Hi, thank you Justin and Jerry. We're going to open up the lines right now for probably one or two questions. You can either unmute your line and ask the question to the phone line or, which seems to be more popular, using the Q&A feature that is part of the live meeting environment. So I'll leave it open for a minute or two to throw a question out if people have them for Justin and Jerry in their presentation. Great, and I just ask for those that do want to actually speak to their question if you could just use that indicator on the top right-hand side of your screen to raise your virtual hand. And I'd also ask the attendees to please mute their line. So star six, and also please don't put your phone on hold. And I will go off lecture mode and hopefully the line will be giving up for us to take those questions. Okay. We've got a couple here. Yeah, we have two questions here and my apologies for turning my back. The monitor that's on the other side of the room is too far for my aging eyes, slowly aging eyes to see. So I'm going to have to turn my back and look at the other screen. So we have a question here from Jesse. What are some of the conditions that would incentive developers to include cutting edge green building features? So I'll pass it over to you, Justin and Jerry. Incentives to get people to include more cutting edge? What are some of the conditions that would incentive developers to include cutting edge green building features? Well, unfortunately there aren't a lot of incentives that one can provide. The reality is that because you're talking about cutting edge, those are unknowns. Unknowns mean the likelihood of cost overruns and all of those sorts of things affect profitability on a project. If you're wanting those sorts of things in your projects that are being developed, you need to put them in. Otherwise, until people, other people start using them and including them in the project and developers gain experience and inclusion of these types of things and figuring out where the economies of scale are and adding these projects, it's unlikely that they're going to be driven by outside incentives. You could look at cash offsets or offering credits for doing it. Density bonusing are some mechanisms that other municipalities have done in exchange for green components being included in projects. Okay, thank you. We've got another question here from Robin. You can click on the next one. Robin, do you have recommendations on how municipalities can reduce land speculation? Well, that's a good one. Well, one of the best ways that we recommend is to make sure that you have clarity in your zoning policy and certainly if you have an amenity contribution policy or bylaw in place in your community, making it clear and explicit that there are going to be expectations that there's going to be shares in the increased value due to rezoning a piece of land. Messaging that, partnering with your community both with the private developers in the community but also the landowners in the community to make sure that message gets a lot across very clear to the vendor. I mean, ultimately, unless the vendor finds a willing dance partner that's willing to overpay for the piece of property, they're going to be stuck and they're not going to be able to sell it. Therefore, there won't be a bit of an increase in price. But again, there's not necessarily a magic bullet that can solve that. The best thing you can do is provide clarity of process and make sure that the information is disseminated to as wide an audience as possible. Okay, thanks, Jerry. I'm going to take one more question and we'll have to leave the other questions. They look great. I'm glad people are trying me into the end of the session on the Q&A. So we've got one more question here from Ed. Can you present a few performances on different types of residential projects? Oddly enough, we can. Our next presenter, Michael Geller, could be doing that. Okay. Well, that's a good segue. Thank you, Ed, for teeing off our next presenter. I'd like to introduce our next presenter, which is Michael Geller, who's all too familiar with the factors that make or break if you can switch it to me, the camera? Affordable Housing Project. Michael Geller is a Vancouver-based architect, planner, real estate consultant and property developer with four decades of experience in public, private and institutional sectors. He's the president of the Geller Group, which comprises Michael Geller and Associates Limited, active in planning and real estate consulting, Laneway Cottages Inc., which is seeking opportunities to develop, Laneway Housing around the region, and Geller Properties, a builder of small, niche residential projects, including apartments for people who do not want to live in apartments. Michael was the president and CEO as well of the SFU Community Trust. He's a blogger and an active participant on Twitter. He's also an adjacent faculty member with SFU Centre for Sustainable Community Development, past president of the Urban Development Institute, and a life member of the Architectural Institute of BC and the Fellow of Canadian Institute of Planners. There's much more to his background, but let's just hear from him directly. Michael will be reviewing a performer just as Ed said would be helpful, and showing how different elements can make or break an affordable housing project. So over to you, Michael. Thank you very much. So if I can pull up my first slide. Do you think it's this button here? Okay, so what I thought I would do is precisely what the last questioner had asked for, which is actually look at a couple of real, fictional, but real performers to give you an idea of what they look like. And I'm going to do one for a rental project and then one for a condominium project. And before I start I will point out that everybody has a slightly different way of doing their performers, but hopefully this will at least give you some idea as to what they look like. So the first one I want to look at, I'm trying to let me just see. Sorry, here we're just having a little technical difficulties since my slides are not advancing. They seem to be advancing now at our end. Okay, unfortunately I can't see. Which one, that is a bit of a problem. Let's just see if we can... Michael, are you unable to see your slides at this point? I can't see. I'm still on my title slide. Sorry about this, folks. Darby, could you take over advancing the slides? Yes. Absolutely. So I'm just going to try and go back. I don't have as many as the last presenters, so if you can just... First one is, what are stacked townhouses? Okay, so if we're on that slide, I thought I would use stacked townhouses as an example because it's a relatively new form of housing, but it's one that I think could be introduced to the Vancouver Marketplace as a way of producing more affordable, ground-oriented forms of housing. And if you go to Toronto, stacked townhouses are very, very popular, and this illustration happens to be from Toronto, but we're beginning to see more and more. So I'm now going to go to the next slide, which is a project description. Do we have that one up? Yes, we do. Okay, so in this case, we touch briefly on the subject of floor space ratio as a way of measuring the size of a development. I've created a fictional site of about 55,000 square feet, and we're allowing a density of about 1.5. And I think most of you are familiar with the concept of floor space ratio, but for those who are not, it basically is a measure between the area of a development and the area of its site. And what are we doing here? Oh, hold it. There we are. In this case, we have a 1.5 floor space ratio which gives us a building area of about 83,000 square feet. It's a four-story development. It has 64 suites, and I've arbitrarily picked half two bedroom and half three bedroom. And I mention this because we rarely see developers building larger three-bedroom rental units in large part because sometimes they just simply don't want to rent the families with children, unfortunately. And oftentimes it's because the rents begin to get a little bit higher. But if we go to the next slide, we can now talk about this topic of leasable area versus buildable area. And as pointed out by Justin, in the case of a townhouse project or a stacked townhouse project, you can actually lease 100% pretty well of the area that you build. In the case of an apartment building, it typically might be about 85% efficient. In other words, the leasable or saleable area is really about 85% of what you have to build. One of the other important considerations in looking at a pro forma is how many parking spaces have to be provided. And indeed, whenever I give a talk on creating affordable housing, I always use parking as number one because I often think, especially in areas where we're having to build underground parking, if we can reduce the number of parking spaces, both for residents and for visitors, then we can significantly reduce the overall costs and hopefully the resulting rents and sale prices. So if we now go to the next slide, project costs, you'll see here that we have, I've put in the three components that we already discussed. There's the land, the costs associated with land, the hard costs, the soft costs, and then the profits, which I don't think of as a cost, but it is a component of the overall cost. We often think of land like we think of mince meat at the butcher. There we buy it by the pounds or the kilo. Developers tend to think of land costs in terms of dollars per square foot. Not everywhere, in some places they will talk about so many thousands of dollars per door in the case of a townhouse or apartment project. But certainly in Metro, most developers think of price of land in terms of dollars per square foot, and of course when they buy that land, they're going to have to play property purchase tax, which averages about 2% of the cost as well as they're going to have legal fees and other costs. We've already heard that the hard costs really are the construction costs, but there's two components that one should not ignore. One is the actual cost of building the building on site, but sometimes it's very important to consider what might be some of the off-site costs. Are you having to put traffic lights at an intersection or provide additional roads or sewer hookups and so forth? Generally speaking, it's not unlikely that there will be some off-site costs. Just to confuse you a little bit, I wanted to put a note to point out that when a developer builds a condo, and we're going to look at a condo pro forma, each jelly can recover all of his GST that he has to pay, or she has to pay, by selling the unit. But in the case of a rental building, this is not actually the case. In a rental building, a portion of the GST is not recovered, and so the cost can be higher for a rental building if it was identical to a condo just because of the GST. So maybe if we go on to the next slide, we can now start to take a look at some of those soft costs that we were talking about before. First of all, there's architectural engineering fees, and these can vary significantly depending on the complexity of a project, but when you start to add in some of the other consultants, the envelope consultant, the geotechnical consultant, it's not uncommon for those to end up being about 5% to 7% of the actual construction cost. There's the whole question of municipal fees, and we're going to have a much more thorough presentation on that later on, but certainly there's the fees associated with the cost of permits, many municipalities charge inspection fees, there's going to be hookup fees, and if I have one concern, it's the many municipalities, it's very difficult to know what these fees are going to be when you purchase a site. This is particularly true when you get to these next items, the development cost charges, which may well be clear, but the community amenity contributions, which are becoming an increasingly popular way of charging developers for the privilege of building housing, especially when they're rezoning. I want to make it clear, I think most developers accept the fact that they have to make these payments and sometimes we don't care as long as we can pass them on to the buyers, I mean that's the reality, but what is increasingly concerning is that very often you don't know what the community amenity contribution is going to be until after you've submitted your rezoning application and you get a chance to sit down with the municipal officials and their consultants, and this is I think a very serious concern that many developers are having, and I think the way to deal with it is simply to become much more upfront and say as the City of Vancouver is now starting to do, believe it or not, they've said if you want to build on the Canby Corridor and rezone a single family lot for an apartment, you're going to have to pay $55 additional square foot of density, it's a huge number, it's going to add to the cost of housing, but at least it's certain. So then you get into some of these other costs, and as was mentioned before, the insurance, the legal, preparation of surveys, the property taxes during construction, and they can add up, but in this case order magnitude around $100,000. Then the developer is going to have his overhead costs and a project management fee, and a typical can be anywhere from 2% to 5%, but 3% is a pretty common number, that's 3%, usually of the hard costs. In this case it's a rental building so you're going to have costs associating with leasing, now some would say surely as soon as you build them they'll all lease up, well not always depending on the rent, and this is a real number that I've got from one of my clients who builds rental apartments, then you're going to have contingencies, and the amount of the contingency is often a function of how far you are along on the development process, but again 5% is not an uncommon number based on the hard and the soft costs, not the land costs, but the hardened soft costs, and over time as the project's designed and the construction costs are known that contingency can come down a bit. We then touch on the financing costs, and this is a very complex thing because you really have different types of financing. The typical developer is going to put up a certain amount of equity and the bank is likely to get 25%, and then he'll hopefully borrow 75% of the total cost. In the good old days developers were usually able to borrow 100% of the cost, especially if they were arranging financing. It's much more difficult today. So to calculate the financing fees, what we generally do is take the applicable interest rate, in this case let's say 5%, the construction period, say 14 months, and then recognizing at the beginning you haven't incurred a lot of costs, and at the end you've incurred all the costs, you can divide the costs by two, and that gives you a rough estimate of what those costs are. But I think it is important to note that the holding costs of the land are another significant cost that have to be added on to this. And very often the developer's using his own money because it's hard to get more than about a 50% loan from the conventional lenders. Now many other developers are also going to have what they call mezzanine funds financing. They're going to go to someone else to see if they can borrow a bit more money so they don't have to put up so much equity. So in this particular project the soft costs come up to just over $3 million. It gives us a total project cost of about $18 million. And then we often will look at that cost in terms of per square foot and per suite. And so these are the sorts of numbers that in this case. So if we go on to the next slide we can now start to look at what are the revenues for this rental project. Now the rental rate is going to vary of course by location but for discussion purposes I've picked a rental rate for this project of $1.40 per square foot. That means per month so a thousand square foot unit is renting for $1,140 per month. In this case the larger two bedrooms are $1,560, the three bedrooms around $2,000. That then gives us the total rent over the course of the year. Now in the old days you also got some money from those washing machines and dryers. Although today it's very common that the machines are in the unit so there's no revenue but there's likely going to be revenue from the parking and it can be anywhere from $15 a month to $200 a month depending on the location. But $35 a month that's not an uncommon rental rate for a parking space so that gives you a total revenue. But when you do a performer there's always going to be some vacancy and so in this case because the rental market is tight I'm using 2%, 3% might be a more typical number in other jurisdictions and that then gives us something called the effective gross revenue and if we go to the next slide we'll now take a look at some of the other numbers. Of course you've got all this money coming in but you have to spend money. There's going to be property taxes, maintenance, repairs, management and usually they're calculated as a percentage of that effective gross revenue and it's not uncommon for them to be in the order of about 30%. Maybe sometimes 32%, sometimes a little higher. But then the next thing so if you deduct that effective gross, those operating expenses from the income that will then give you your net operating income and then that now gives you how much money you're likely going to end up with per year from this project. And then to get an idea as to how profitable this project is and again as was mentioned there's different ways of doing this but one way is simply to divide the operating income by the total cost and you may add in of course a profit onto those total costs and that gives you either what we often refer to as the break even return or capitalization rate which these days is often in that 5% range. The weather time when they used to be 8% or 9% and indeed sometimes it could be much slower. So that's a rental performer and now if we can go to the next slide we're going to talk about developing a condominium together. So this is a wood frame condominium and it's got the same site area if we go to the next slide and it has the same floor space. So we're building 83,000 square feet but again and don't forget this we can't sell the 83,000 square feet. Few people want to buy those corridors so we're going to only sell about 70,000 square feet and in this case I've prepared a performer based on about 50 of the units, 100 units, 50 of them are smaller one bedrooms and these sizes 550 to 625 are the kind of numbers you're seeing increasingly developers are making units smaller and smaller some of you will soon be approached to see if you want to do 350 square foot units. Two bedrooms depending on whether all of the bathrooms may well be in that 775 850 square foot of course they could be a lot larger. So then the way we do a performer is we look at this total saleable square footage, we pick what we think we can sell them for and sometimes we'll pick a number based on what projects surrounding projects are selling for and sometimes what we'll do is we'll simply look at what are our costs and what is our desired profit margin and put in that number and pray that we're going to get it. So in this case we're looking about $335 a foot because it's a total revenue but then we're going to have sales commissions and we may have in-house sales people or we may have a broker and then there will be other brokers and so 3% is not an uncommon number and that gives you a net revenue and if we go to the next slide we can now begin to look at the costs and I won't dwell on this as much as a general comment the cost to building a condominium is likely going to be a bit higher than for a rental because developers like to put in those features to seduce the buyers. In the old days these would be fireplaces, we're not building those as often they may well include granite countertops and maybe a more attractive exterior and so forth. But that being said sometimes a good quality rental building will have higher costs for the energy system, the heating system because when people are going to own a building they often will put in a better quality of system than if they're going to sell it and that's a reality. So in this case that would frame condominium may cost $160 a foot and again I just want to mention that is a dollar per square foot measured over the above ground area and that cost can vary depending on the unit size. If we had all 1200 square foot units the cost would come down because we have the same number of kitchens and maybe even the same number of bathrooms with a lot more bedroom space and again in this case we've got some off sites as well. So if we go to the next slide again we can look at the soft costs and they're going to be very similar except that in this case the amenity contribution and the DCCs may be greater if you're building condominiums as compared to rental. One of the other additional costs you're going to have is homeowner protection office fees. There's registration fees and fees per unit. So that's another thing to look at. The other thing we're going to have is marketing costs. In addition to the sales commissions to do brochures put up those signs if you're going to have all those full page ads in the Vancouver Sun and so forth that's going to have significantly and it's astounding how much money sometimes you pay to market these projects and it's not uncommon to have marketing costs of 2 to 4% of the revenues on top of the 3% commissions that you're paying and again we've got the financing costs and so forth. So if we go to the next slide we can begin to take a look at the overall picture here. So our total project costs in this case were about $20 million it worked out to about $240 per gross square foot but remember we can only sell about 70,000 feet so our cost per saleable foot was about 282. It worked out to around 200,000 a suite we deduct what it costs from what we hope we're going to get from that 335 sale price it gives us a profit of just under $3 million which in this case is about 15% of the cost and that's believe it or not although it seems like a lot of money that is probably the bottom end of the range because if you're going to go to the developer and go to the bank you need to show them. So to summarize on the last slide coming up in order to assess the viability you really do need to look at what is the land cost now here we talked about $40 a foot you know in Vancouver right now people are paying $150, $175 a foot just for the land so how can you build affordable housing when you're looking at costs like that. In the case of rental you have to look at what are those annual operating costs condominiums need to demonstrate a profit and I'd like to just finish off touching on the last question or nerdy question about putting in green features, lead features in the case of Vancouver if you want to rezone you have to go to lead gold I'm a former director of the Green Building Council I'm up at SFU Center for Sustainable Community Development many people like to say that if you design a building properly and you integrate all the consultants together a green project need not cost much more than a regular project it's not true it really isn't true that there is a higher capital cost but often times there will be a lower cost over time and sometimes the owners, the renters they can cover off the additional costs with their savings. To my mind if you do want to incent people to do it you do sometimes have to either give them additional density which is what Vancouver does or you can green light the project tell them it's going to get a faster approval that's I think a wonderful incentive for some developers and also if you know that they're going to increase the chances of getting their rezoning but please don't use the demand for green as sort of a bribe to get developers to do things that don't necessarily make sense and there's many examples of that but hopefully I've given you a little bit of a peek inside what looks like a developer's pro forma and that you know a little bit more now than you did when you joined this webinar. Over to you Mr. Host. Thank you Michael. I want to turn it over to potentially just one or two quick questions and then I'm going to move to David Freeman Lou. So if folks have one or two questions I see there's some one or two left over from the earlier presentation but I'm going to hold on to those until after David's done his presentation. So if there's one or two questions for Michael and his material really quick ones I'm happy to take those so you can go to the Q&A feed. Over the feedback button in the top right hand corner it's always a pleasure to be able to talk directly to you and it takes a little bit of time for people to type in their questions. Just while we do have a second here I would just like to apologize for some of the connectivity issues that seem to have affected our video I'm not sure if that's universal but it has affected at least a few of the computers so certainly glad we're able to still hear each other and hopefully have been able to see the slides as well. I get my apologies for that and we look forward to your questions here. Okay I'll give you another 30 seconds and if not we'll move on to our next presenter Dave. Oh and now our camera's working. We do have a few gremlins in the system today unfortunately. Okay we've got one and Michael is for you our smaller project more inviting to developers than bigger ones. Well big developers prefer to do big projects small developers prefer to do smaller projects but there's no doubt that larger projects tend to have a greater economy of scale and many of the developers that I speak to say you know it's oftentimes as much work to do a 12 unit project as it is to do a 120 unit project but that being said the risks are often greater with the larger projects as well so it's difficult to generalize about that but certainly I think one thing that you will see is a lot of builders prefer to build say a high rise building rather than a mid rise concrete building because there's an economy of scale doing a high rise that you often don't achieve with a 6 or 8 story concrete building so to that extent the larger project is sometimes more economical and more affordable. One of the other things that makes a project more affordable as we touched on is the efficiency imagine if you can sell 90% of what you build instead of 85% that can make a project significantly more profitable and how do you do that? By having what we call a larger floor plate and if you want to know what a larger floor plate looks like just fly to Toronto or go down to New Westminster and look at some of the newer developments down there which have instead of a 5 or 6,000 square foot floor plate and so it's an indirect answer to that question. Okay, thanks Michael. We've got one more I'm going to take before I move on to Dave and then we'll do the other questions at the end of the Q&A session. Solidation of lots. How important is the ability for developers to be able to consolidate smaller lots? Example 50 to 33 lots into larger ones? It's very, very important and indeed I was looking at a site today, a realtor was asking me about a C2 site a site along Commercial Street. The zoning would allow a three floor space ratio but because it's a small site when you actually factor in all the setbacks and the parking requirements the site is you probably are not going to get more than about 2.2 FSR and even at that given the cost of trying to achieve the parking it's probably not viable to develop a site and that's why when you drive around many municipalities you'll see one or two storey older commercial buildings along these very, very popular arterial streets because it's just simply too difficult to develop a 35 or 33 or 50 or even 66 foot long material. In the case of residential development it's the same thing. If you can put two lots together or three lots together you can begin to do some wonderful things. If you go I'll give you a link to my blog but on my blog I've been boasting about a little development I did in West Vancouver. I did it in West Vancouver because I believed if I could get approval to do this in West Vancouver I could do it anywhere else in Canada but what I did was I took three lots, took down three houses and put nine units, six duplexes, three coach houses but what made it work was the fact that we were able to assemble three lots in a row and that's a form of development that I think could become very popular in the future as we try to create more affordable housing for people who want to move out of single family homes but stay in their neighborhood. Excellent, thanks Michael. So I'm going to turn it over to somebody who's been long waiting in the shadows. So David Freeman is currently the Assistant Director of Development and Engineering Services for the City of Kamloops and he's also responsible for the city's real estate portfolio. He has over 30 years of very experience in the development industry having worked with Marathon Realty Centaur Development and the Lower Nicola Indian Band and the last 20 years with the City of Kamloops. David has a background in Civil and Sexual Engineering from BCIT and the Urban Land Economic Program at UBC. David will provide us with the local government perspective on some of the housing costs that the previous presenters have touched on. So with that I'll turn it over to you. David, thank you. Thank you Jenny and good afternoon everyone and looking at the registration I can see that about half of the people are from local and regional government so this will be what you people will look at. So of course what is local government's contribution it typically is I just lost my little arrow slide. There we go. It's basically time and fees as both Michael and Justin and Jerry indicated. Time because time is money and it's opportunity. It's consistently seen as lost opportunity and just ask anybody you know that had a project ready to go in the spring of 2008 versus the fall of 2008 and the timing is directly related to our application processing times. Fees, we've got fees that's correct. We've got permit fees application fees, road closure fees, service connection fees various security required you'll be faced with offsite works if your project is moving into an older area with sub-standard infrastructure you'll be faced with that. Building permit fees throughout the province, everybody charges for a building permit fee, development cost charges to assist in dealing with aging infrastructure and infrastructure that's related to growth and some communities are in including community amenity contributions in these processes. Well real estate has its golden rule of location. Development's principle rule is basically anytime there's change there's a regulation. If you have a regulation we're going to require a permit and a permit requires a process and those of you out there know that where you have a process there's a fee. The secret that we're trying to get across is that what we're doing is attempting to help you build a better community and a bigger part of this is the sustainable development practices. That's a key word that is out in the community that the politicians are hearing that neighborhoods are championing but to integrate it into the actual housing equation as the previous two speakers mentioned it's difficult and it's costly and it'll come in time. The expectation will be there but it's a cost that's new to the program. So why are you paying to regulate that change? Because municipal governments are gatekeepers. They're the people that are looked to to protect the built form of the community. Our people, our voters, our taxpayers, it's nimbyism. Everybody is aware, sorry very wary of change and they want to participate in it and the way that you control that change is through regulation and for the development group out there that's listening anytime you're looking at regulation always aware that you check where the authority comes from on that regulate. What can municipalities do? What can't they do? Some practices have just evolved over time, the regulations have changed, so always check your regulatory authority. Building and planning come under part 21 for municipalities, part 21 and 26 of the local government act. So what do we regulate? Well if you were on our side of the counter and you came in with your application, there may be federal regulations that we have to circulate your application through DFO, Canada Post is going to want to say where the box goes. You may have First Nations, if you're putting a mixed use development together that's got a liquor primary in the building, a street level commercial you'll have RCMP involvement in the review of that. Provincially we have it all. The provincial government's got Waste Management Act that we're looking after contaminated sites regulations. If you answer yes to a schedule to use, those of you out there know the amount of time that that adds to a program. Repairing area regulations, that's recently been downloaded on municipalities. If you're chasing to highways and this is your transportation infrastructure we'll want to take a look at your application. Provincial fire codes may require new hydrants. Local health authority, if you're looking at a bare land strata, you've got a little bit cheaper land, you want to reduce your servicing costs, you need a reservoir because you're only going to get 20 or 30 units out there, you now become a water purveyor and that's a very complicated process to go through but it is out there. Municipality is going to look at you for your official community plan process. Are you rezoning? Do you need a DP? Are you varying any regulations through a development variance permit? Are you in a geotechnically sensitive area? Are you in a heritage conservation neighborhood? If you're having to go through subdivision that's going to have a whole new set of regulations with it and your property may be included in part of a parks master plan but has a park plan community component to it. And also our private utilities and railways are getting more and more involved in the referral process and commenting back. Up in Camelots we have both CM and CP coming through and they both get a kick at development applications. Comprehensive development zones, rezonings are a zoning form that a municipality can adopt that gets a lot more creative than our standard RM1, RM2 density per unit versus per door versus per square footage. The comprehensive development zone can build in minimum maximum heights, minimum maximum unit counts. You can have minimum and maximum on commercial if you're looking at mixed use and it looks at that flexibility. We want to look at why do we have permits processes well because we have a lot of clients and who are the clients? Developers are clients, the purchasers are our clients, the taxpayers are our clients. Price point of your unit doesn't impact the amount of work on your application or the process that has to go through if it's impacting the neighborhood. Eternal processes require manpower. Manpower in the days of tight budget restraints mean fewer and fewer people to do more and more applications. And if you're an external process you've got stakeholder participation. You're going out into neighborhoods. When you take the proformas that the two previous presenters have shown, here's what municipalities and politicians in neighborhoods see on a total project value. Municipal fees are coming in and this is if this was done in Kamloops. You'd be looking at 2% on the project value. It is 2.5%, sorry I just lost mine. Post reserve. Here we go. Going on straight project cost it's 2.5%. Development cost charges the demon construction cost. It's a cost recovery mechanism for growth for infrastructure. It's non-packed, they're funded. The authority comes out of the local government act. It shows what municipalities can and can't charge. And it's an unbelievably complex process. Our city of Kamloops bylaw is 117 pages double sided. We follow the UBCM best practices guide that came out a number of years ago. And we have our home builders at the table going through the projects. What do you need to know about DCCs? There are exemptions. There are reductions. They're in the act. And you can go for smaller units. You can get reductions on credits. And also assist factors. Michael mentioned intersection upgrades. It's important to realize that most development cost charge bylaws have an amount in there for intersection upgrades. Moving through a very generalized statement. It's a balancing act. You are paying a user fee. Like with any other fee it's a balance between the politicians with taxation and user fees. Chargers and fees are approved by your city council. Municipalities obligation. What are you looking for? Well you're looking for much. You're looking for efficiency, transparency, and certainty. You don't want those goal posts changing. You want to know what your costs are up front. And you want us to understand the importance of a lender. And as both presenters have indicated. What we would like to see when you come up to the front counter get to know that staff. Get to know who that project team is going to be. Do your homework. Come in with a complete application. What we're telling developers these days is development is a very complex business. You need to retain professional. And also you will be required to engage the neighborhood. The neighborhoods are speaking to politicians and that's how you're looking at their involvement in the change process. Quick overview of the municipalities look at development through our side of the counter. Thank you. Questions to all the presenters. And I do have some leftovers from our previous question period. So I'm going to first go to Kylie. She has her hand up. So if you want to mute your phone, if Kylie is still chimed on through the webinar, you want to mute your phone and ask one of our presenters a question. And I'll just do a little bit of lecture mode to allow you to do that. So just one moment here. The conference is no longer in lecture mode. We have the next question is from Rachel. And Rachel is on the question and I think this one was actually in place for Michael. And the question is, how important is the ability for developers to be able to consolidate smaller ones? So I think we've already actually discussed that one. So we're going to go on to any other questions. We've got a question from Ian Brown. He's got his little question indicator on. Ian, are you still with us and have a question? Indicator on. Okay. So while you have the floor Ian, why don't you ask your question? Okay. I'm calling in from the North Sandwich or No Sandwich, which is kind of like West Vancouver. And one of the challenges we have, the biggest challenges for our affordable housing initiative is the community concern about affordable housing, but not in my backyard. I think anyone else has that experience. I think the question should be, does anybody not have that experience? Okay. Sorry, I am just against the audience. We aren't getting this feedback and then we can continue this discussion. Please start. Sorry Michael, go ahead. I often think the best way to address that not in my backyard syndrome is by beginning to provide the kind of housing that the people who may well be objecting are actually going to be looking for either themselves or for their children or for their grandchildren. And indeed, this little infill project we did in West Vancouver, over 150 people did either come and speak against the project to the public hearing or write letters in opposition. There were an equal number of people who wanted to remain in their own community and live in a different form of housing. And the key in this case was getting a council to approve it and then to build something that once it was completed, people began to say what was all the fuss about. So to my mind, encourage municipal officials, if you think somebody's got a good project, encourage their council to take a chance because there's nothing like having some on-the-ground demonstration of these alternative forms of housing, whether it's street row houses or infill duplexes, because once people see them, they often find that they're much less opposed to them than they thought they were going to be. Thank you, Michael. We're going to turn it over to some questions that are online. First of affordability, the example of community land trust. Do you want to talk about community land trust? Community land trust is an idea that I think we're going to hear a lot more about in the future. Certainly in the eastern United States, they're becoming more and more popular. If you want to learn about them, just google John Emanuel Davis. He really is the father of community land trust in the United States. They're also very popular in England. But essentially what it is, is if you could imagine a sort of a non-profit entity or a community-based entity, it's on the role of being a developer. It still has to make some money or certainly cover it. But I think it's a wonderful way, both in urban and in rural areas, to begin to deliver more affordable forms of housing. I think that certainly as things have changed over the last 50 years in how the federal government has been involved in housing, where it is downloading the responsibilities and costs of providing affordable housing to the provincial governments and then to municipal governments, creative ways of approaching that are going to become more prevalent. One of the approaches that community land trust often take, and it's an idea I think you're going to see in the future, and I did do a blog post on it, the whole concept of shared equity. A lot of people who are renting can't afford to buy a house. They might be able to afford to buy half an apartment. So imagine the situation where a non-profit group or a community trust, which owns the other half, and over time the individual acquires a greater and greater interest. In England shared equity is one of the very common ways of buying. Not just from non-profits, but even from private developers. And I think that there's an idea there. Things like rent to own. Some of us use to rent to own televisions. Rent to own housing is another idea that I think we begin to look at. We just ask again that our attendees to mute please as we do have someone's hand in queue as well. The conference is in lecture mode. You can click on it because it reduces the time taken question mark. A variety of different ways. Number one, it affects what you're able to point it out earlier. If you've got a 30 foot frontage or a 33 foot frontage, you might have the entitlement to build a three FSR development, but the reality is that with the setbacks you can only build just over two. So if you only have one or two lots, you might only be able to do single family or a couple of duplexes. You might not be able to do an apartment building which would mean that you have fewer units you're able to offer. You're likely going to be offering larger units which means the price point is going to be higher. If you're able to acquire seven or eight sites and assemble them, you might be able to do an apartment building or a larger block development. So in those ways you're able to offer a wider variety of development types. You're also able to spread the cost of development and achieve those economies of scale in doing that. But again, if you're looking at length of time, that adds to the cost as well. If you're looking at a holdout, who's in the middle of the block that you're trying to assemble to develop and you're having to hold out these other properties, four or five properties for six months a year or two years, till that holdout sells, then your carrying costs on those properties can be high as well. Thanks, Jerry. Can you guys in the office there just try to get closer to the middle of the camera? Yeah, we can just see your shoulder. We were doing this intentionally. Alright, the next question is from Cori, and I'll just read it out, but I missed David's slide prior to the conclusion slide. I'm just wondering if he can provide and post again. So we will have all of the webinar material posted online, so we will be able to get your hands on that. Next question is actually on the phone, and it's Sean. Sean, you have a question? No longer in lecture mode. Yes, we hear you. Okay, great. Thank you for taking my question. So my understanding of economics is that the price of units is going to be based on people's willingness to pay, not based on the sum of the costs. Obviously the costs are linked to the price, but I was wondering if a municipality can reduce costs in an effort to improve affordability, will they not have to secure a price so that their reduced costs are not consumed either in an increased profit, either to the land owner or to the developer? Sean, I'm glad you asked this question. I think it's something that many people think about all the time. It's interesting, when I first joined CMAC in 1972, we had a program called the Limited Dividend Program, where CMAC was willing to lend developer money to do a project, provided they legally agreed that they would limit the profit that they were going to make on that project. And indeed, if you think about it, if the municipality is going to do something to help reduce the cost to a developer, it's not unreasonable to impose a similar set of obligations. Now, it's not something that's done very often. Some developers may not want to participate in that, but I think there are many developers who will. One of the questions that was asked of us before we started this is you say you're going to get a 15% profit. Why don't you just try to make a 5% profit? Well, the truth is if the risk is very, very small, some developers would be very happy to make a 5% profit on every project. The problem they have though is they have to demonstrate to the bank, if they're going to borrow the money, that the project is indeed going to be profitable. And that's why the bank is looking for a margin that may well be greater than 5%, but there's nothing to stop a developer charging less and making a lower profit once he's got his financing and once the building is completed. The only other thing I would say before Jerry adds to this is I also think one of the best ways to keep the costs down is to have competition. I did very well on my project in West Vancouver because it took five years to get approved and nobody else wanted to take that on. And as a result I had literally no competition. And so to a certain degree I could charge what the market would bear. But if there were three projects on each side of me and across the street offering a similar type of accommodation, that would have brought the cost down. And that's why you'll often hear developers say one of the best ways to address affordability is to increase supply and increase competition. I would agree with what Michael said. And getting back to the original point of the question, reducing costs does that necessarily flow through to the end purchaser? The answer is that yes and no. It's market driven. Developers typically who are seeking to maximize their profits will charge whatever the market will bear for their units. What it ultimately does though is it would open up more competition, more developers if costs are lower then there's less risk involved. There would be more developers actively developing within the market and you would have more opportunities for people to purchase. That would bring down pricing somewhat and you have people still able to afford the same amount. Say they're able to afford a $200,000 unit. But now the prices are $190,000. So what you've done is you've increased the amount that you're able to enter into. Just don't do what the city of Vancouver did after the mayor's task force on affordable housing. When it said we'll be willing to consider innovative projects and we'll fast track the rezoning as long as the end price is 20% below market and remains 20% below market forever. Because the practical reality is the only way it could be 20% is if there was no profit whatsoever. It was an unrealistic thing. But those of you who are interested in affordable housing I would highly recommend going onto the Vancouver website and look at the results of the mayor's task force on affordable housing. I did a report on building form. There's a number of other reports of the task force and I think there's many good ideas on that website and in that material that could apply to communities large and small in British Columbia. Okay folks, we're getting close to the end of our time and actually we're a couple minutes over. We do have two questions in the evening. I could hit them very quickly and then wrap up if people want to allow that kind of flexibility. So the two questions are one from Simon currently available and a small population. How do small communities find developers interested in affordable housing for temporary workers? One way is to approach the nearest Urban Development Institute or Canadian Home Builders chapter and just let them know that you think there is a demand for new housing in your community because many of them may not have even thought about developing there in the local place. So UDI has chapters in the interior of Vancouver Island and in Lower Mainland. Maine Home Builders also has chapters. Sometimes it's as simple as just getting the word out that there is a demand. I mean certainly as we hear the conversations about liquid natural gas and what might be happening in the north, a lot of developers are beginning to think it may be time for them to pull out their long johns and their winter coats and head up north because there may well be opportunities up there that they've never thought about in the past. The other way one could look at trying to get things moving there would be looking at putting in municipal land and partnering with developers. So that would be one way certainly if you're looking at trying to create more affordable projects or tenancy projects for workers in the area. It's a way of reducing the risk somewhat for private developers and a win for the community for the developer and for the municipality then. Thanks Jerry and Michael. We do have some more questions in the wing but I think I am going to wrap things up. Folks if you do have questions we have a slide here at the end with the emails of our presenters so if you do have other questions please feel free to just get in touch with them with those questions. I'm going to wrap up really really quickly. I think today's discussion was excellent. I think it's just one piece of the puzzle to help us better understand how these pieces fit together so that we can create more affordable housing on the ground. It is complex and I think our presenters did give us a good view of how that complexity from the need for financing from the banks to soft and hard costs and municipal costs and all those different tensions at Clay that need to be considered to make an affordable housing project successful. So I really want to thank our presenters today. I think they did a great job and really help. There certainly seems to be a desire to get a better understanding of these pieces and I think we certainly tapped into that today. I want to end off just talking about our future. We have one more future webinar as part of this pilot. It's in January on the secondary suite so I hope you can chime in for us during that webinar and I also want to also thank the folks here at the Economic Development Division who help us coordinate and host these webinars. We do have a little slide here that's talking about some resources that you can tap into as well as the email of the presenters if you do have further questions for them. So thank you for chiming in. This was recorded and it will be available online for you to pass on to your colleagues that you were able to attend or to refer back to in the future. So thank you. I'll pass goodbye and hopefully where you are in the province or in the rest of the country there's some sunshine. Bye bye.