BC Business
Big Fat Deal
BCBusiness takes you inside one of the most outrageously upmarket real estate offerings in the province.
Address: 1350 Laurier Avenue
Price: $10,000,000
Listing: R2743330
The skinny: Four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 4,240 square foot house on 20,000 square feet of land in Shaughnessy
The bling: The price has been set: it’s $10 million minimum to buy a house in Shaughnessy. That’s the barrier. How do we know that? Because this house is the minimum. You know it’s bad when the listing doesn’t feature any photos of the interior, instead focusing on the massive amount of land sitting in front and behind of a house that resembles the one Clint Eastwood sat on the porch of in Gran Torino (life-sized figure of Clint sold separately).
It’s hard to imagine that this exact house would cost much more than, say, $300,000 if it was in somewhere like Ohio or Indiana. But this is Shaughnessy, and of course the listing waxes poetic about “the opportunity to build your new dream home on this 100 by 200-foot lot.”
If you have $10 million to buy it, the thinking goes, you have countless other millions to knock it down and built a state-of-the-art structure the second you blast this artifice of 1952 architecture into the next dimension, right? Hilariously, the BC Assessment value of the actual building on this lot makes up 1.1 percent of the house’s full value.
But you can find the real humour in the last line of the listing:
“Superb location in the catchment areas of Vancouver’s finest public schools (Shaughnessy Elementary and Sir Hamber Secondary) and easy proximity to elite private schools such as York House, Little Flower Academy and a short drive to St George’s School.”
I’ve lived in Vancouver most of my life and have never heard anyone refer to Eric Hamber as “Sir Hamber.” I’ve also never heard it referred to as one of Vancouver’s finest public schools.
The hidden extras: Did we mention the massive backyard?