The case began in December 2015 when the lead plaintiff filed a notice of civil suit, alleging that the faulty windows fogged up, leaked and shattered spontaneously.
Lawyers involved in a class action lawsuit over faulty windows in Vancouver’s Shangri-La residential condo tower have brought in real estate appraisers to assess the impact of the problems on the market value of the building’s luxury units.
There is no specific answer in the expert affidavits during this preliminary phase, but coming to a conclusion about who is responsible for compensating losses is at the heart of a complicated case that dates back to 2015 and which should be heard this fall.
The essay includes one of Vancouver’s tallest towers, where windows frame floor-to-ceiling ocean and mountain views and some of the city’s most expensive condos.
Subject to appeals, the case is expected to last over 130 days.
Original buyers and current owners who purchased a condo from an original buyer had until last week to opt out of the class action lawsuit against the legal owner of the land, KBK No. 11 Ventures Ltd., the developer , 1100 Georgia Partnership, and its partners, including companies linked to leading local groups such as Peterson Group and Westbank Corp.
The case began in December 2015 when the lead plaintiff filed a notice of civil suit, alleging that the faulty windows fogged up, leaked and shattered spontaneously.
In an affidavit filed last year, businessman Amos Michelson, who has owned and lived in a penthouse in the building since 2009, said that several months after moving in he noticed fogging up his windows which lasted for hours, then several days, making it difficult to see outside. In total, three interior panes of his cabinet broke spontaneously. The one that broke in 2017 sent shards of glass into his unit’s pool and also into a plaza below, as well as the fifth-floor hotel pool.
As stratum president, he was also aware of other instances in other units where insulating glass fogged up and broke. He included various photos as exhibits.
In total, there are 307 residential units in the building which are part of two distinct strata. The various lawsuits seeking to recover warranty costs from insurers and developers, builders and contractors have been merged into one class action case.
Future buyers are wondering about the situation and in particular the cost of dealing with it, according to real estate agents.
In an affidavit forming part of the class action, Neil Hahn of Garnett Wilson Realty Advisors, a certified appraiser with the Appraisal Institute of Canada, reviewed all sales for the strata that cover the 234 units on floors 16 through 43 of the tower. .
He compared the prices of those sales to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver’s housing price index for downtown residential apartments. The index tracks changes in market values over time for a reference unit in a given area.
He found that over time, sales prices for Shangri-La units were lower or lower than the market as a whole.
“From a valuation perspective, the risk of a large special valuation can impact demand and willingness to pay from potential buyers,” he wrote.
It looked at 188 repeat sales, following units pre-sold in 2004 or 2005 and then resold between December 2008, when the building was completed, and the end of 2021.
Determining how much an individual unit might have sold for, “but for the gaps”, at any given time would require further analysis.
In another affidavit filed last year before the class action certification, certified business appraiser Richard Crosson said that while it was possible for an appraiser to come up with a single estimate of the decline in value of all units, it was more likely that units would first be grouped by size or other criteria and then rated.
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