OSOYOOS TIMES-April 28, 2010
By Paul Everest – Osoyoos Times
The 28-hectare Willow Beach property at the head of Osoyoos Lake is listed as for sale in the classified section of the Calgary Herald newspaper.
The listing was posted on April 25 and states “Development Site Beautiful 69 acre res. dev. sites w/1300 feet of lake frontage at north arm of Lake Osoyoos in the Thompson Okanagan wine region of BC.”
Jon Buckley, a realtor with CB Richard Ellis Canada, a company that deals in commercial real estate, is named as the real estate agent handling the sale.
CB Richard Ellis Canada was also handing the sale of the Indigo property on Cottonwood Drive.
Requests for comment from Buckley and the owner of the property, Georgia Laine Developments Ltd. of Vancouver, about how much the property is listed for or why it is up for sale were not answered before the Osoyoos Times’ press deadline.
The property is also listed for sale at BuyAndSell.ca.
Georgia Laine Developments purchased the property from the Quintal family in June of 2007 for $23 million in what was called the largest deal for real estate development land in the South Okanagan’s history.
At the time of the sale, the property included a 38-pad mobile home park, a 120-site campground, a long willow-tree-lined beach, a 1.6-hectare yard and home for the Quintal family and 26 hectares of farmland.
Currently there are about 40 lots occupied by mobile and manufactured homes on the property.
At one point, the developers intended to build a 1,088-unit resort on the property but that project fell through due to global economic difficulties that arose in the past two years.
The Times learned last September that Quest Capital Corp., a finance company, holds the mortgage for the Willow Beach property.
A representative of Quest Capital Corp. redirected requests for comment from the Times to the developers.
The Willow Beach Resort project went as far as third reading in the Regional District Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) Official Community Plan and zoning amendment process.
The project stalled at that stage in August of 2008 while the developers looked for ways to finance the resort in the wake of the global economic downturn.
Robert Wilson, president of Georgia Laine Developments, signed an agreement with the Town of Osoyoos in April, 2008, where the developers would contribute money to the Northwest Sewage Project if the Town would extend its sewage system to service the resort.
Last June, however, when it became clear that the project would not be built to the 1,088-unit scale originally planned, the developers said they would only contribute to the sewer extension if the existing 40 lots on the Willow Beach property would be connected.
In November, it was announced that the owner of the Willow Beach property would contribute $950,000 to the sewer project, with $614,000 going towards reducing connection costs for northwest sector homeowners.
The rest of the Willow Beach money would be used to pay for the 40 lots on the Willow Beach property to be serviced by the sewer extension and to cover the upgrades to the Town’s sewer system.
Barry Romanko, the Town’s chief administrative officer, said any sale of the property would not affect the sewer project because the developer’s financial contribution to the project was already received by the Town before work began on extending the Town’s sewer system last month.
“The money needed (for the project) was in place before the project moved forward,” Romanko said in an interview last month.
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