Vancouver Olympic condo buyers suing city, developer over athletes’ village
The Olympic dream has turned out to be more of a nightmare, say condo owners suing the city and the developer because they claim their units in the 2010 athletes’ village don’t meet the gold-medal standard they were promised.
Several lawsuits have been filed by the owners of sixty-two units, who bought the condos based on a display suite they saw prior to the Games.
Bryan Baynham, lawyer for the owners, said his clients shouldn’t be punished for false advertising.
“They saw a display suite, they expected to get what was in the display suite and they didn’t. That’s part of the nature of pre-sales,” he said Thursday.
“They show what they’re going to produce and they put it in glossy brochures and they show you in the display suite. If they delivered what was in the display suite, my clients wouldn’t have a complaint.”
He said his clients are not speculators who bought numerous units thinking they could cash in after the Games.
“These are people who bought into the Olympic dream,” Baynham said.
He said the residents want out of their contracts, and if they’re successful it could cost the city nearly $45 million.
The city was forced to step in and secure hundreds of millions of dollars to finish the project prior to the Games when the developer’s original lender stopped paying its loan.
The problems continued after the Olympics when sales failed to meet expectations, and developer Millennium Development Corp. came up short on a $200-million loan payment last fall. In November, the village was put into receivership.
City Coun. Geoff Meggs said he couldn’t speculate on the outcome of the case.
Video footage filmed by the residents shows cracks in ceilings, pools of water below windows and pipes and a trickle of water from a tap with no pressure. In one condo there appear to be nails sticking out of base boards and a soggy piece of cardboard underneath hardwood floors.
But Lesli Boldt, who represents Ernst & Young, the court-appointed receiver for the developer, Millennium South East False Creek Properties Ltd., said those issues have been fixed.
“As soon as they took over as receiver on Nov. 17, 2010, they implemented a program to assess the deficiencies – they have essentially, a deficiency SWAT team, people that are going in and making repairs and have been doing that consistently over the last four months now,” Boldt said.
“It’s a very robust program to address deficiencies and they’ve communicated directly with residents as well.”
She was unable to say how much the repairs have cost, other than to say a full public accounting will be provided in a report to the court expected later this spring.
The condo owners have protection under the New Home Warranty Program, she said, and the problems are being addressed.
However, Baynham said the owners have other complaints that can’t be fixed with a hammer or nail gun.
“Some of the bedrooms are so small that you can’t put a regular bed in it and open your closet doors,” he said.
Baynham said most of his clients paid between $600,000 and $800,000 for their condos, though about 10 paid over $1 million.
They want out of the deals, or at least to be compensated for the difference between market value of their homes when they bought them and what they’ll sell for now. Condos in the rebranded condo development were put on sale last month, with prices slashed an average of 30 per cent to try and fill what has been a ghost town since the end of the 2010 Games.
Baynham said his clients are not suing the contractor for defective work, but rather are suing under consumer protection legislation to rescind the contract because the city and the Millennium parent company weren’t named in the disclosure statement.
But George Macintosh, a lawyer for companies that sell the units on behalf of the developers, said there’s no merit to the claims.
“In our view there was adequate disclosure of who was doing what,” he said, adding that buyers knew what they were getting into when they signed the original sale documents.
“They signed off and they saw the demo suites with the square footages of the units they were getting… I think they were aware of that.”
Mcintosh said he had no knowledge of the alleged deficiencies until the lawsuit was filed Wednesday and is now looking into the matter.
Boldt said current condo sales have not been affected by the ongoing troubles at the former athletes’ village.
“The sales to date have been brisk,” she said. “I can tell you that a hundred families or purchasers and tenants will moving into the village by the end of April.”
