Affinity heralds return of influential developer

The Vancouver Sun - Westcoast Homes - March 20, 2010

Cameron McNeill’s tone is downright reverential when he talks about Nat Bosa.

“The man’s a visionary,” says the president of MAC Marketing Solutions.

Over the past four decades, Bosa has led the construction of more than 20,000 condos around North America.

“Look at what he [Bosa] has done for the Belltown area of Seattle,” says McNeill. “He built half of Brentwood, he was way ahead of his time with developing the waterfront in New Westminster and Citygate (in Vancouver.)”

McNeill says that at a meeting of the Urban Development Institute, other prominent members of the development community were seen to be visibly relieved that Bosa was making a return to the Greater Vancouver market with the Affinity project, his first development in the Vancouver area in about seven years. Bosa downplayed any sense of selfimportance in a rare interview. He pointed out that his sons continued building here while he focused on projects in California.

“Basically it got a lot worse down there than anybody expected,” he says. “While we wait for that to rebound, I said ‘Let’s revisit back home for a while.’”

Bosa is 65, but shows no signs of slowing down. He’s a little battered and bruised after weathering the stormy economic conditions down south, but says he’s still biking, skiing, and enjoying life.

Bosa believes the love affair the Lower Mainland has with real estate has never faded; with a stable banking system and a level of demand sustained by immigration, it’s a place he’ll always return to.

He particularly believes in the Brentwood neighbourhood, situating the family- operated company’s head office there. “This area’s just got nowhere to go but up,” Bosa says.“The match has been struck a long time ago. Right now it’s expanding, this is not any more pioneering.”

Considering the local market conditions, he believes it will always be healthy. “We are a place that people like to live. The only time we get messed up is when the government changes. We need business friendly policies, and we can’t be in for big surprises from the government.” Bosa agrees that he’s never been afraid to be a market leader and to enter a new area. “When I bought Citygate, people thought I was nuts.”

So what does coming back to Vancouver mean now? “Yeah, I could say it’s a vote of confidence in the Lower Mainland, because I come in, get on this project, and I start building. Obviously, I gotta have confidence, otherwise I’m losing it!” To Bosa, the slowdown in construction has allowed the market to level off a little. The vacancy rate continues to be low, and people are continuing to move to Vancouver; Bosa sees that as an issue of supply and demand weighed heavily toward demand.

He is also discounting the potential cooling- off effects of the HST, recalling that consumers eventually got used to the GST after its introduction in 1991. “There’s no question, HST is a big cost, I don’t like it, and for a little while, you’ll see some negotiations around it. But after a while, it just becomes part of the cost of doing business or buying a home.”

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