General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[BuildingScout]

We're discussing why the Ottawa St property isn't being redeveloped. Put yourself in the position of a potential developer. In fact a developer who owned the property since 2012 did just that. Presumably they know more about this sort of stuff than we do. Yet they decided to sell the property rather than develop it. And they sold it to someone, a car dealer, who likely isn't going to have to invest much new money into it in order to operate his business on it.

You give the developer far too much credit. First, it seems to me that he was always looking to flip it. First to the Toronto supermarket investors, now to Wright Auto Sales when the former fell through. Second, a developer might choose to pass for many reasons other than the development not being viable.

• Maybe his trusty contractor is busy with other projects?
  
• maybe they exhausted their network of investors with other ongoing projects and cannot presently secure the cash to finance the project?
  
• maybe he just doesn't understand LRT and has the wrong growth projections?
  
• maybe they go for short term gains at the expense of the long term health of their business model, just like the Waterloo Inn shareholders focused on forestalling the competition instead of developing the amazing property they were sitting on?
  

I have a couple of friends who are developers and those are some of the reasons I've heard directly from them when they tell me some project they were working on folded.