Phil Hare, the realtor now marketing the Kutenai Landing condos, is encouraging past and future buyers of units in the development to stay with the project.

The kitchen in the Kutenai Landing sales office. Photo by Chris Shepherd.

Hare has just taken on marketing Kutenai Landing from the developer, New Future Group. He says the development needs to make roughly 36 sales so it can proceed.

Back in 2009, when Hare as a sales representative for New Future Group, Hare says he had about 800 to 900 names in a database, people who had contacted him about buying a unit in the condo. That was before the condos were actually up for sale, however.

Hare says Kutenai Landing needed about 36 sales, roughly $12 million or half of the project to get started. Then came the sales launch in October 2009 and things were looking good, says Hare.

“After that it just died,” says Hare. “And that was based on the meltdown in the U.S. and people were scared to spend their money.”

Hare is now a realtor, not an employee of New Future, and he says the housing market is starting to turn around in Nelson. Hare just opened up a branch of Fair Realty covering the Kootenays. He’s running his office out of the Kutenai Landing sales office where he’ll sell condos in the development as well as properties elsewhere in the community.

He points to the good sales of other condos in the city and the proposed Nelson Landing, further up the waterfront.

“It’s really exciting to feel that maybe things are starting to turn around here,” says Hare.

He says the market cycles and the region has down for awhile now. “It’s my expectation we’re that at some point in the near future we’re going to see some more activity.”

Hare says he’s talked with the existing buyers, there are 17 of them, and roughly half are committed to staying on. There are several who are a “maybe” and four people who aren’t going to be able to stay with the development, says Hare.

He says those people dropping out are doing so for various reasons. “It’s not that they don’t like the project, it’s life circumstances.”

Hare says Kutenai Landing would be a great benefit for the community, citing increased property taxes for the city and the economic spinoffs of having more people move into the community.

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