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Former premier Bill Vander
Zalm owns a lakefront acreage near 100 Mile
House that boasts peace and quiet, water views,
forest shade and riding trails. Thursday, he'll
hand it over to the highest bidder.
Vander Zalm, in an interview,
said he took over the 34-hectare parcel on
Tatton Lake, north of 100 Mile House, in the
late 1970s as partial payment for a business
deal, but hasn't had many opportunities to make
use of it, having only visited it a few times in
the decades since.
Now the former premier
believes it is a good time to sell, and a good
chance to test the real-estate auctioneering
services of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers.
"I'm a bit of an auctioneer
myself," Vander Zalm noted, having loaned his
voice to numerous charity auctions in the past.
"I see myself, at these
fundraisers, getting $1,000 for something that's
worth maybe $100, so I'm enthused as an
auctioneer."
Ritchie Bros. auctions off a
considerable amount of farm land in Saskatchewan
and Alberta on an annual basis, but just this
year opened up a real estate division in B.C.,
said Clay Tippett, the company's marketing
manager.
Kieran Holm, sales
development manager for Ritchie Bros. Real
Estate Services Ltd., said interest in the
Vander Zalm property has come from as near as
B.C. and as far away as Dubai, so it is
difficult to judge who might be in the bidding,
or how much it will go for. Recreational real
estate prices can be difficult to set because
there are few comparable sales.
The land will be sold in
Ritchie Bros. typical "unreserved" style, which
means the auctioneer sets no minimum "reserve"
price that has to be met and it will go to the
highest bidder on the day.
Holm said the tactic works
for buyers because they don't have to endure a
lengthy process of making an offer, waiting for
a response and then making counteroffers on
other bids. In an auction, they do their due
diligence "and bid to their dreams."
Sellers, he added, get the
certainty of knowing when and where their
property will be sold, if they don't know the
exact price.
Holm said Ritchie Bros.'
traditional market for heavy equipment includes
a lot of people who work in the woods and would
naturally be attracted to property like Vander
Zalm's, but he added that this sale has drawn a
lot of inquiries from potential customers who
have never dealt with them before.
Rudy Nielsen,
president of Niho Land & Cattle Co.,
which specializes in selling recreational real
estate, said he has seen attempts to auction
land in the past, but hasn't seen it work very
well.
Nielsen said Ritchie Bros.
did score a success in auctioning off its own
commercial property in Prince George by selling
it well above the asking price, but recreational
property is harder to price.
"It's like a view in West
Vancouver," Nielsen said. "One person thinks its
worth $100,000, another thinks it's worth
$800,000. Recreational is a very imperfect
market."
He added that the
recreational is also a very hot market right now
with a great deal of interest being shown by
buyers in Alberta, Ontario, Washington state,
California and as far afield as Miami.
Nielsen said one of his firms recently took a
subdivision of five-acre, ocean-front lots on
the Queen Charlotte Islands, which he expected
would take months to sell, and sold it out
within two weeks at prices of $200,000 to
$250,000 each. "This is my 40th year in the
recreational land business, and I've never seen
it like this," Nielsen said. "It's a very hot
market." |
