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News from Central Alberta

Posted by kmancer on March 22nd, 2010

I’ve been in Red Deer this week.  We haven’t actually looked at the data yet, but we have heard that the level of affluence along Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton is unequalled outside the oil sheikdoms of the Middle East. We’ll see what the numbers say, but the communities do indeed look prosperous. As I said to our client: “Even the trailer parks look attractive”. Not that I have anything against trailer parks of course.

The Red Deer seniors’ market is oversupplied, a situation likely to last for some time. Part of the oversupply is attributable to two large Masterpiece projects in the southeast corner of town, right across the street from each other. There may be some merit in the auto mall approach to seniors’ housing, but it didn’t work in Red Deer. Perhaps that is one of the reasons Masterpiece is now in the hands of its lenders. The Holiday project in town, Victoria Gardens, also has a number of vacancies. Many in the industry, including Lumina, believe that the Holiday model—large numbers of studios, vast dining rooms, major meal at noon—is too old-fashioned to survive much longer. That is in terms of new projects of course. There are something like 300 existing projects in the US and 35 in Canada. My tour guide told me that Holiday is keen to expand to Australia and Europe. Every time I walk into a Holiday project I get a severe case of déjà vu, but of course none of their residents has probably been in more than one—the one they live in—and even if they did know they lived in a cookie cutter, they probably wouldn’t care.

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