High-end homes go higher

May 6th, 2008 8:53 AM

Bring in the Brink's truck if you're looking to wow the neighbours with a new trophy home in Winnipeg's increasingly swanky housing market.

"Three or four years ago, a million-dollar house was a big thing in this city," Winnipeg architect Dean Syverson said in an interview Wednesday.

"Now our people are doing million-dollar renos," he said, citing the case of one home on Wellington Crescent where the owner is spending more than $2 million on a 9,000-square-foot addition to his 4,500 square foot home.

"We're also seeing more two- and three-million-dollar homes," Syverson said. "They're rare, but they're being done."

Syverson Monteyne Architecture, for example, has three two-million-dollar-plus projects lined up for this year -- and three or four more that are in the one- to two-million-dollar price range.

"Two or three years ago, we might have had one home a year that was over a million dollars," Syverson said. "But in the last few years, it (the high-end new-homes market) has just been booming and the pockets seem to be getting deeper and deeper."

Another head-turning trend in recent years has seen some Winnipeggers buying older, existing homes in toney areas like Tuxedo and North River Heights, and then tearing them down and replacing them with new, multi-million-dollar mansions.

"There's been more (homebuilding) activity on Wellington Crescent in the last three years than there was in the previous 30 years," said Huntington Homes co-owner Rob Swan.

"I think the people who have money in Winnipeg are more likely to build their own home because they want something that's tailored to their own needs," added Daytona Homes owner Art Gross.

Swan said his company's top homes run up to $1.5 million, about double what they were three or four years ago.

He and Syverson said a number of factors are fuelling Winnipeg's high-end boom. Low interest rates and rising property values -- a new Century 21 Canada report issued Wednesday said Winnipeg had the second biggest housing price increase in the country in the last year -- have given more buyers the financial clout and the confidence to splurge.

"It's become more affordable, and people are saying, 'this is an investment and it's a good investment,'" Swan said. "Winnipeg is now a good spot to put your money into real estate... from a resale point of view."

He said today's homebuyers also look at new-home purchases in a different way than their parents did.

"People's goal today is not to buy a house and pay it off. Now it's, 'I want what I want and I'm going to have what I want.' That's the real key difference."

So what do these high-rollers want in their trophy homes?

For starters: high ceilings.

"We don't build anything with eight-foot ceilings any more." Swan said. "And no one builds a house that doesn't have granite or quartz kitchen countertops in it. And everybody is putting in hardwood flooring."

Even granite countertops don't cut it anymore with some discerning homebuyers, according to Daytona's Gross.

"Granite countertops have become kind of subdivision. They're not all that special anymore," Gross said, adding onyx or concrete are the countertops of choice these days.

Geothermal heating systems are also become popular, Syverson said, along with bigger, better-quality windows, higher-grade insulation, and more environmentally-friendly finishings. While some of those things may add to the up-front constructions costs, buyers figure they'll pay for themselves in long-term energy savings, he said.

Swan said while the rising cost of land, labour and building materials are driving up the cost of higher-end homes, that doesn't seem to bother those buyers.

In its Spring 2008 National House Price Survey report released Wednesday, Century 21 said another year of stability in Manitoba's resource, power generation and manufacturing sectors helped fuel another surge in house prices within Winnipeg's resale homes market.

The firm looked at selling prices in three city neighbourhoods -- River Park South, the West End and Charleswood -- and found the average selling price increased by 19 per cent to $249,000 in River Park South, by 24 per cent to $180,500 in the West End, and by 34 per cent to $262,000 in Charleswood.

It also looked at selling prices in three neighbourhoods in the province's second-largest city, Brandon, and found price increases of two per cent in Kirkaldy Heights and Green Acres, and a decline of two percent in Parkdale Heights.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

Type the characters you see in this picture, click "Submit" when finished.

		This helps us prevent automated programs from creating bogus contacts and adding them to your contacts database.