DEVELOPING STORIES

DAVIE STREET APARTMENT BUILDING AWAITS ITS COURT-ORDERED SALE
It’s not the only foreclosed West End property

by Jake McGrail
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1485 Davie today. (Ewan Streit photo)

If you’ve walked by the multi-storey apartment building at 1485 Davie Street then you might have seen the sign indicating a court-ordered sale. That means if you have, say, a spare $42 million or so lying around, it could be yours!

The building at the corner of Davie and Nicola sits just across the street from the Gabriola Mansion, and it represents the final piece of a doomed series of development investments by Align Properties, formerly known as Vivagrand Developments.

Align Properties is (or was?) a Canadian branch of the Chinese real estate company Xiangli Group. The company initiated redevelopment plans at four different sites in Vancouver. Two of them were in the West End, at 1485 Davie and 1555 Robson Street, while and the other two were near Queen Elizabeth Park.

The original plan. (WT Leung Architects / Vivagrand Developments)

Talk of turning the Davie property into a 22-storey, 158-unit tower began all the way back in 2018, and then-named Vivagrand Developments soon began to offer buyout packages for the existing tenants. Most of them took it. But then…nothing happened. 

Despite an initial project completion date of 2022, by that year there had been nothing done and the tenant population in the building had even begun to slowly rise (although the building still remains about half empty today). 

After borrowing $32 million in 2021, Align Properties defaulted on its loan payments just two years later. Foreclosure began in September of 2023, with the B.C. Supreme Court stating that Align owed $37 million in loan payments, property taxes and utility fees (just for this one site). That was three months after the Robson property was foreclosed, and the two Queen Elizabeth properties suffered the same fate in 2024.

gwl realty’s plan for 1555 robson. (Arcadis / GWL Realty Advisors)

That led to court-ordered sales for all four properties, with 1485 Davie being the only one yet to sell. 1555 Robson was quickly snapped up by GWL Realty for $58 million in April of last year, and now has a new redevelopment plan that was approved by the city just a couple of months ago.

The new plan for the Robson Site is to turn basically the entire block at Robson and Cardero into a pair of over 300-foot tall towers that hold nearly 400 rental homes and two levels of retail space within a podium base. When they first submitted the application last year, GWL Realty said that they hoped for a project completion date of 2028. That would be exactly a decade after Align submitted their original plans for redeveloping the site, but as of right now there’s no firm date on when tear-downs and construction might begin.

The Davie Street apartment building, meanwhile, remains in limbo. The property has been listed for sale since March of last year and there hasn’t been a taker as yet. It’s hard to make any real guess as to how long it might take to find a Court-approved buyer, and it’s already been listed for notably longer than the other three former Align properties. Two of them (including the one on Robson) took well under a year to sell, while the other lasted almost exactly one year on the market before it closed just a couple weeks ago.

Once there is a sale agreed to and finalized, it likely won’t be long until there’s a new redevelopment plan submitted to the city. Until then, the sign out front will remain and the residents inside the building will continue to go about their lives as they wait to see what will actually happen to their homes.