Toronto Union Park | 303.26m | 58s | Oxford Properties | Pelli Clarke Pelli

RC1:

Besides, if they are "shelving" it, it probably has to do with the softening office/condo market and not because they couldn't get a casino.

AoD
 
Some of you on this forum really need to learn a thing or two ...

So you think if the city let the Casino proposal go through, they would have went ahead and built the office / residential component in a over saturated market ? Sure you can make an argument that a casino would generate demand for a hotel but that's it. I'm not saying the market is over saturated (though I think it is from a commercial point of view) but what some seem to have loved about this project was the height of the development, and that was surely due to the office / residential components ...

So it boils down to what you think about the market - if you believe it is over saturated at best what we would have had here was a casino + hotel and an empty placeholder for a couple office / condo buildings; Otherwise nothing stops them from going ahead with that at the present time and surely there is a lot of money to be had if they can indeed fill out / sell the towers ...
 
They never needed to sell the towers, the residential units were to be rentals. I am also doubtful that the market is over saturated. Once the new towers open I expect vacancy to jump to around 10%, but that is still fairly low.

You have to remember that the current market is almost dangerously under saturated, there isn't a single space downtown available that is larger than 1 or 2 floors.
 
From what I recall the towers were going to be rentals and the rental market in TO is very tight with super low vacancies.
 
casino

Peepers said:
Thanks for posting that Ushahid. So it looks like this proposal is on the shelf for now. I think it will take a major shift at city hall, i.e. voting out all the anti-casino crowd - before this proposal gets revived - if ever.
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The whole anti casino bra ha ha was a total red herring...
 
renvel said:
The whole anti casino bra ha ha was a total red herring...
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Bingo. Oxford Place was planned long before the casino debate was on the horizon. Projects this large just don't appear out of nowhere in the span of a few weeks.

When the casino debate came up Oxford saw an opportunity to make more money by including a casino. So they went ahead and unveiled the project earlier than originally planned and claimed that it only can exist with the casino.
 
innsertnamehere said:
They never needed to sell the towers, the residential units were to be rentals. I am also doubtful that the market is over saturated. Once the new towers open I expect vacancy to jump to around 10%, but that is still fairly low.

You have to remember that the current market is almost dangerously under saturated, there isn't a single space downtown available that is larger than 1 or 2 floors.
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Right an even stronger market that the casino will have little to no effect in the long term.



Now re office vacancy I disagree; Here's why: In the US, 10% is a very health market and you generally see construction - most US cities are well above 10% even when times are good. Not so much in Canada, where the rates are in the 6-8% - why ? Toronto (and most Canadian cities) have way less landlords compared to the states (even per capita wise) a larger share of the office market is owned by the largest X commercial companies; What this means is when new buildings are constructed these landlords know they will be in direct competition with their older office stock ... in the US this is true but to a lesser degree ..
 
gabe said:
Too bad. :(
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To be fair my comment was only regarding the 10% vacancy rate; Assuming all the new construction (and vacated space in the older office stock) fill out well, we can still see more buildings. But you are starting to see more and more CRE analyst predict rates around 10% ... but again to be fair the same was said last boom and that didn't materialize, so really only time will tell. The one advantage that was lost over the last cycle was the finical sector, essentially this is why we have 3/4% vacancy rates today, they absorbed a lot more space then predicted between 2009-2012 - hard to believe that'll happen again.
 
Oxford bought the MTCC long before there was a casino conversation. That said a casino amplified everything they were trying to do with the site. Oxford owns hotels and it owns about 6,000 apartment units in Canada so hotels and apartments are a big focus. There is NO reason they wouldn’t put a hotel on the site (a hotel attached to the city’s convention centre is ALWAYS going to do all right if not very well). Especially now with Allied/RioCan losing The Globe and Mail there will be an increase in retail at that site and probably gave Oxford as much pause as anything else. They will still do retail there (look at the retail design at the Hudson Yards to get pretty much an exact idea of what they are thinking.

Blake is much more of a trophy hunter than his predecessor and I would suspect that this will still have that trophy element. I would suspect that the actual convention centre space will be increased more than it would have been with the casino, the retail will stay the same or grow as well (A Nordstrom’s , Saks or European department store anchor plus another 600k-1mln sq.ft. or retail). At least two residential buildings, 1-2 condo buildings and 1-2 rentals.

I don’t think there is enough demand for the office as it was. I would love to see it but unless they get a massive tenant in pre-leasing AND partner support, I think this will be the scaled back portion.
 
Nope, it is a casualty of Toronto thinking correctly.

And yes, this is essentially dead. Apparently Oxford still wants to redevelop the site, but is looking long term (10+ years). Don't expect to see anything for quite a while.
 
innsertnamehere said:
Nope, it is a casualty of Toronto thinking correctly.

And yes, this is essentially dead. Apparently Oxford still wants to redevelop the site, but is looking long term (10+ years). Don't expect to see anything for quite a while.
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More like city council deciding what is correct...as far as i recall, city residents were split 50/50 on a Casino

And really, you don't know if this development is dead, who is to say that Oxford will not go ahead with an expansion of the Convention Centre, hotel/condo towers as a first phase.
 
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