Wesbild to open its info centre Saturday

The number of housing starts may have fallen like snow over the past year but Burke Mountain developers say they’re confident the spring sunshine will usher in a new wave of home buyers for northeast Coquitlam.

Tomorrow, Wesbild Holdings Ltd., which owns about 200 acres of developable land on Burke Mountain, will open its information centre at the corner of Coast Meridian Road and David Avenue.

Wesbild’s Jen Derbyshire said the company needed a central location on Burke for builders to showcase their lots and homes to customers in the Foothills neighbourhood and “to tell our story” about what Wesbild has done on the mountain so far.

The city of Coquitlam — the largest landowner on Burke Mountain — plans to add another 24,000 residents to the lower slopes by 2020 in five master-planned villages: Upper Hyde Creek, Lower Hyde Creek, Smiling Creek, Partington Creek and Hazel Drive.

Wesbild undertook neighbourhood plan designs for Upper Hyde and Smiling creeks, a process that took several years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Wesbild has six builders for its sites responsible for construction of up to 1,600 residential units; they are: Morningstar Homes, Wallmark Homes, CP Homes, Foxridge Homes, Polygon Homes and Thomas Homes.

MacDonald Realty realtor Taryn Aragon said early spring is typically a good time for home sales. And with the poor economic climate, lending rates are low and prices are down — about $150,000 less than last year for some Burke properties, she said.

“Getting on the ground floor — in a new home, in a new community with new schools — from the beginning makes good investment sense because the prices are bound to go up sooner than later,” she said.

Dale Barron, president of Morningstar Homes, which is based in Coquitlam, said January was the best month in his company’s history, with 23 sales in five projects in the Lower Mainland. Last weekend, it sold seven homes in the Belmont neighbourhood on Burke, bringing its total sales for single-family detached homes to about 60 (it bought 155 lots from Wesbild last fall).

Like Morningstar, Thomas Homes will have a sales representative at the Foothills information centre for its eight houses, located off David Avenue. To date, it has sold two.

“Things are pretty tough right now,” owner Thomas Hogge said, “but more people come out to look in the spring so we’re expecting things to pick up a bit.”

The builders’ and realtor’s comments come as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. announced yesterday it’s forecasting sharply lower levels of house starts for the next two years and sliding home sales because of the global recession. CMHC also predicts existing home sales to drop 14.6% this year.