The twists and turns of CURV: 60-storey luxury tower planned for downtown Vancouver now facing receivership
The display room features elegant sofas and a massive screen runs a video with the project's architects speaking from London and New York. The sales centre's windows are emblazoned with marketing text that loftily touts the project as being 'designed for personal and planetary well-being.'
But court documents filed in B.C. Supreme Court paint a picture of a project grounded in financial turmoil.
On July 11, Royal Bank of Canada, on behalf of a group of lenders that also includes the Bank of Montreal and Meridian Credit Union, initiated receivership proceedings against the developers of the CURV luxury tower in the West End.
A court petition, first reported by real estate news website Storeys.com, describes a mortgage agreement where the developers of CURV owe a principal amount of $90 million that came due at the end of April and that is growing as interest accrues. As of July 10, the amount owed is over $91 million and B.C. Supreme Court will hear the application for receivership on July 25.
In a city with many dramatic real estate tales, this one rolled together many twists, turns and gripping headlines before reaching this point.
The project by Montreal-based Brivia Group originally proposed 328 strata units, 50 market rental units and 102 social housing units.
In March 2025, Vancouver city council approved that Brivia could pay $55 million in a cash-in-lieu exchange for dropping the 102 social housing units.
The project struggled to sell enough of its expensive presale strata units in a building with over 300 of them as the market for these turned.
New buyers were even being offered a Porsche as an incentive to buy.
Jacky Chan, a Vancouver real estate agent who was marketing CURV units, told the Globe and Mail in June 2024 that many of the presale buyers who had signed up were 'super wealthy, seasoned investors and holders of large property portfolios.'
Lenders usually require that projects pre-sell between 50 to 70 per cent of units in order to qualify for construction financing needed to begin building without adding other sources of capital. Chan told the Globe the project still needed another $100 million.
At that point, the developers had secured an extension of an extra year on the usual marketing period of 12 months, giving them until May 2025, which was first reported by Storeys.com.
The CURV site on Nelson Street now remains wrapped in signage for the project. The old apartment buildings never got demolished and sit vacant.
The property first caught attention back in 2016 when Ian Young of the South China Morning Post reported that two old, walk-up apartment buildings, sitting side by side at what was 1059 and 1075 Nelson Street, had been flipped three times in three years, with one of the sales being a very big step-up in value.
Vancouver developer Wall Financial Corp. first bought the properties for $16.8 million in 2013. It sold them to Sun Commercial Real Estate, a group of investors that specialized in pooling funds from Vancouver's immigrant Chinese community, for $60 million in 2016, who then flipped it to a single buyer for $68 million in a share sale.
In April 2021, Montreal-based Brivia Group bought the project. The sale price was not disclosed, but Brivia aimed to build the world's tallest passive house or ultralow energy building. One-bedroom units started selling for more than $1 million and the top floor, 7,300-square foot penthouse was listed at $60 million.
'The project was completely ill-conceived from day one and those in the development industry knew as much, but there was a very ambitious project manager who no doubt made a lot of money, along with the real estate agents and other consultants and previous owners of the property,' said Michael Geller, a retired architect, real estate developer and consultant, who remembers going to the CURV launch party at the downtown sales centre.
'I suspect someone will try and buy this property at a discounted price and likely hold on to it for a while since right now, it really doesn't make sense to build either condominiums or a purpose-built rental on this site.'
jlee-young@postmedia.com
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