The math doesn’t work. You can’t pay more than you’re making. The money has to come from somewhere.”

Jens von Bergmann

Rogers Arena loses its teenage status next month when it becomes a reasonably mature 20-year-old sports and entertainment venue.

The downtown Vancouver arena so carefully wedged between the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts has handled more than 27 million visitors at 3,000-plus events since hometown rocker Bryan Adams opened it with a sold-out concert on Sept. 19, 1995.

The building formerly known as General Motors Place has hosted a who’s who of global celebrity culture the past two decades — including The Rolling Stones, Madonna, U2, Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama.

It’s best known for being the Vancouver Canucks’ home base and for hosting the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies before the team bolted for Memphis in 2001. The Vancouver Ravens National Lacrosse League team (2002-2004) and Vancouver Voodoo roller hockey squad (1996) also had brief stints in the facility that was the brainchild of former Canucks owner Arthur Griffiths.

The Canucks played in the Pacific Coliseum in East Vancouver for 27 years before heading to the bright lights of the downtown core.

Griffiths said the Canucks invested in many Coliseum improvements over the years — including new luxury suites, a restaurant and office upgrades — but it was clear to him by the late 1980s that the most successful National Hockey League clubs were those that owned and operated their own downtown arenas.

“My instincts told me that (staying in the Coliseum) wouldn’t work for a number of reasons,” he said in an interview. “It was in the wrong location for our customers — not near rapid transit and not in the downtown entertainment district where people who literally write our cheques like to go.

“So we had to step up to the plate and find a new creative solution.”

Griffiths said the Canucks considered three potential downtown arena sites before settling on the 2.1-hectare property they bought from Concord Pacific for $12 million in 1993.

Ironically, the undeveloped property was used to display the world’s largest hockey stick during Expo 86.

The club also considered industrial property behind the train station at Main and Terminal and the City of Vancouver’s Larwill Park site bounded by Cambie, Dunsmuir, Beatty and Georgia streets.

The industrial property had contamination issues and Larwill Park might have involved a lease arrangement with the city, rather than outright ownership, so the Concord site was chosen — viaduct restrictions and all.

Then the Canucks had to convince the City of Vancouver — a PNE stakeholder — that moving the team away from the PNE-located Coliseum was a smart move for everybody.

“We assured the city that it wasn’t going to be obligated financially and that this would be a great new downtown asset to revitalize Vancouver,” Griffiths said.

The viaducts clearly constrained the size of the arena and the width of the concourse.

“That’s a very tight site,” Griffiths said. “We kept going back to the architects, asking: ‘Guys, is this going to fit in here?’”

It did fit, and Griffiths feels the physical building constraints created a more intimate environment with superior acoustics.

“You could hear Michael Bublé without a microphone in there,” he said

The new venue became known as General Motors Place after GM paid the Canucks $20 million for a 20-year naming-rights deal but the facility could just as easily have become Air Canada Place if the airline hadn’t missed a contract proposal deadline by 30 minutes.

Griffiths said GM and Air Canada both agreed to the 20-year, $20-million deal but GM responded before the deadline while Air Canada was half an hour late.

“So we were legally and morally bound to accept the first response,” he said.

General Motors nearly went bankrupt during the 2008 global financial crisis and was happy to end the naming-rights contract five years early in 2010, when Canucks broadcaster Rogers Telecommunications stepped in and paid a rumoured $60 million for the right to call the facility Rogers Arena for 10 years.

Canucks Sports & Entertainment chief operating officer Victor de Bonis wouldn’t confirm the naming rights value shot up from $1 million a year to $6 million a year but said those kinds of deals are much different now than they were 20 years ago.

“It’s about how you build your relationships with partners and how they see value in what we can do together,” he said. “We have tremendous partners who really believe in us and Rogers is our most significant partner, by far, based on the sponsorship and broadcast side.”

Ultimately, the debt load created by the $160 million capital cost of the arena, combined with the $125 million US franchise fee to bring the NBA Grizzlies to Vancouver, forced Griffiths to bring in Seattle billionaire John McCaw as a minority partner in 1994 and McCaw bought out Griffiths and his sister, Emily, in 1997.

Griffiths said a weak Canadian dollar at the time made it even more costly to pay Canucks and Grizzlies players’ US-dollar salaries.

“It’s sad it ended the way it did but at the end of the day, I was a millionaire in a business that was becoming a billionaire’s game,” he said.

But Griffiths remains “immensely proud” of the downtown arena he helped create.

“I’m proud that I stuck it out and proud of the people who worked there with me,” he said.

Vancouver sport marketing consultant Tom Mayenknecht said Griffiths deserves credit for building the arena downtown next to BC Place Stadium, the home of the B.C. Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps.

“Yaletown was already moving toward renewal but the presence of the Canucks and those 45 game nights a year, in addition to the Lions and the Whitecaps, has made it the real fulcrum for sports and entertainment in Vancouver,” he said.

Mayenknecht said the $160-million cost to build the arena — about $230 million in 2015 dollars when accounting for inflation — represents excellent value when you consider the skyrocketing cost of Vancouver real estate.

“It would probably be in the neighbourhood of $500 million or $600 million to build that arena from scratch today,” he said.

Langara School of Management instructor Aziz Rajwani said Griffiths also deserves kudos for building the arena with private money, noting it’s common now for public money to foot much of the bill for similar projects.

“Governments were committed to fiscal restraint back in 1993 and public sentiment was very much against giving money to businesses whose players were making millions of dollars,” he said.

Rajwani said the subsequent loss of Canadian NHL franchises in Winnipeg and Quebec City changed that feeling and public funds have since been used to help build new facilities such as the new Rogers Place in Edmonton and the Videotron Centre in Quebec.

(Another privately-funded sports stadium could be in Vancouver’s future as it’s a good bet Whitecaps owners still want to own and operate their own soccer-specific stadium with natural grass at some point.)

Vancouver music industry mogul Sam Feldman said the Pacific Coliseum still works well as a concert venue for certain acts but it was important to build a bigger facility in the downtown core. Rogers Arena can hold about 19,000 people for concerts, compared with around 15,500 at the Coliseum.

“Rogers is a much more modern building so acoustically, it’s going to be better,” Feldman said. “Most major North American cities want to create cultural gathering places in the downtown core and Rogers Arena has really fulfilled that function.”

Canucks Sports & Entertainment is building the second of three highrise apartment towers near the arena, two of which will be physically connected to the facility.

de Bonis said the new connected buildings will help alleviate concourse congestion in the arena by providing space for more food and beverage options and more washrooms.

He said the first completed tower will contain a sports bar — expected to open early next year — that will allow patrons to see inside the arena during games and other events.

de Bonis said the bar will be open every day to provide a “multimedia, mind-blowing experience.”

He said the Canucks still want to build an ice rink near Rogers Arena that would serve as a practice facility for the club and a community facility for downtown Vancouver but plans have yet to be finalized.

He also said there’s always a possibility an NBA team could return to Vancouver to play in the arena some day.

“You can never say never but our No. 1 priority right now is the Vancouver Canucks,” de Bonis said. “My experience with having two tenants here is that you can lose focus.”

So will the 20-year-old arena survive to see its 30th and 40th birthdays and beyond?

de Bonis predicts it will, noting more than $100 million has been spent on facility upgrades to ensure it remains as state-of-the-art as possible.

“It’s a cement structure so it’s not going to fall apart or decay,” he said. “If we do the right things and keep reinvesting in it, it could be around for decades to come.

In recent times, Vancouver has emerged as a popular destination for overseas property investors, especially those from mainland China.

Nearly one-third of buyers in Vancouver had some connection to China, Dan Scarrow of real-estate company Macdonald Realty told Canadian newspaper The Province.

Meanwhile, property prices have been on the rise in the city, putting strain on housing affordability for the locals.

Not surprisingly, there are reports of growing resentment against Chinese buyers in the Vancouver property market.

Now, we come to this question: Is there any solid ground to blame China buyers for making Vancouver properties unaffordable?

Bruce Langereis, president of Vancouver developer Delta Group, has challenged the notion of “Chinese buyers”, especially in the context of Vancouver where nearly one-third of its population is ethnically Chinese.

“There is much attention on Chinese buyers but many of us forget that these ‘Chinese buyers’ have been in Vancouver for a long time,” Langereis said.

According to the Calgary Chinese Cultural Centre, Chinese migration in Canada can be traced back to 1858 when the first wave of Chinese people came to pan for gold in British Columbia.

While “foreign money” is often cited as a major factor that drives Vancouver’s property prices, Michael Ferreira, a managing principal at consultancy firm Urban Analytics, has raised questions on who exactly would constitute “foreign investors”.

“Should we consider foreign buyers with local representation ‘foreign investors’? If their family spends some of their time in Vancouver, does that make them local residents or foreign investors?” he said.

“If you ask ten different individuals, you’ll probably get ten different answers.”

As the local government is not tracking where the buyers come from, Yves Tiberghien, director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), believes the lack of reliable data partly fuels the debate on the “Chinese money” in Vancouver’s property market.

“Sometimes, we hear 80 percent of Vancouver homes bought by mainland Chinese, sometimes we read 35 percent, and sometimes we see an official number of 3-5 percent,” he noted.

“A big part of this spread is how you count mainland Chinese – whether one relative has permanent resident or not as opposed to whether they live here full time or not – and there has been no systematic data tracking foreign inflows into the real estate market.”

If the Chinese has been in the region for generations, and if the affordability question is nothing new to Vancouver, what might be worth pondering is why the community is only concerned about the “Chinese invasion” in recent years.

In fact, offshore investment from mainland Chinese buyers is not as dominant as it may seem, according to Delta Group’s Langereis.

Take the Group’s Private Residences at Hotel Georgia for example: only one-fifth of its buyers are from mainland China while nearly two-thirds are locals.

Even though some buyers are not locals, many bought the properties and live in the apartments from time to time, Langereis said.

“In my 30 years in real estate business, I have seen many examples of Asian buyers who buy the properties here to enjoy the lifestyle that the city offers. Vancouver is not necessarily a global economic center. But it is one of the most livable cities in the world,” he added.

Tsur Somerville, director, UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, said the fundamental issue is not about foreign ownership, but occupancy. He also highlighted that property prices in Vancouver have always been higher than those in many other Canadian cities even before the immigration wave in 1970s.

But Somerville added that the influx of Chinese capital in recent years challenges how North Americans think about immigrants.

Between 2005 and 2012, according to Statistics Canada, 37,000 mainland Chinese millionaires immigrated to British Columbia through the now-defunct wealth-based Immigrant Investor Program.

As Somerville put it: “We are used to the notion of ‘immigrants’ referring to those who work their way up in the host country but not people who come and buy properties for their children.”

According to him, the resentment against the mainland Chinese also taps into the old school notion of Chinese invasion in North America, referring to the concern about the influx of labor from China in the 19th century.

Somerville recalled a similar period in late 1980s and early 1990s when a wave of Hong Kong immigrants came to Vancouver before the Asian city’s 1997 handover to China, and the local community was complaining about how these immigrants transformed the city.

“Over time when their kids grew up here and they became more integrated into the society, you don’t hear such complaints anymore,” he said, suggesting that time will also remedy the resentment against the mainland Chinese.

METRO VANCOUVER — July was a record-breaking month for single-family home demolitions in Richmond, and at least two city councillors are split on why that may be.

Coun. Carol Day said she is sure the spike in demolitions is a result of a delay in a decision to amend residential zoning bylaws, as well as the lengthy — and now highly publicized — process to terminate land-use contracts.

“I knew this was going to happen. Everyone said, ‘Oh no, we won’t see a spike.’ So this next six months is critical,” said Day, referring to the early termination process for the old, provincial contracts which allow larger homes on smaller lots relative to what the city’s residential zoning bylaws dictate.

Day also said the delay to amend those bylaws, in order to implement greater setbacks and more limitations to the volume of newly built homes, is another reason for the spike.

“If I was a builder, I would be fast-tracking anything, too,” she said.

In July developers were given the green light by the City of Richmond 65 times to demolish a single-family home.

The number marks a monthly record since 2006, when the data began to be posted online by the city.

Since January 2009 — the last time zoning bylaws changed (to allow higher homes) — the monthly average has been 29.

As well, 2015 is on pace to be a record year for home demolitions. So far, 287 homes have met their fate. If the trend continues, 492 will be torn down by January. The annual average since 2009 is 351 homes. In 2011, 473 homes were demolished.

If Day is correct about the push to build more, the city may be looking at an even greater rush of development in single-family neighbourhoods granted the process to fully extinguish land-use contracts on 4,000-plus homes could take one to two years, according to deputy city manager Joe Erceg, who has noted there will likely be appeals.

A decision to amend the city’s residential zoning bylaws may be completed as early as late September following a Sept. 8 public hearing on tentatively approved changes to home setbacks (space between homes and property lines).

The hearing takes place at Richmond City Hall and the public is welcome to comment on city council’s decision in July, which saw a 7-2 vote against the recommendations of city planners, who sought to limit ceiling heights and setbacks in a greater manner.

Meanwhile, Coun. Bill McNulty wasn’t convinced about the July spike being related to impending changes to bylaws.

“I do not think the two are correlated and I don’t think any of the demolitions were held up due to the bylaw. We do business as usual,” he said.

The News asked the City of Richmond if the spike could be attributed to anything in particular, such as the delay in amendments to the bylaw.

City spokesman Ted Townsend said the spike was “just a reflection of busy development,” and that “our numbers are up in all categories.”

Homebuilder and real estate agent Raman Kooner said there are likely many factors to the spike.

“It’s an assumption, but I think there’s a bunch of people trying to push things through,” he said.

However, “with the market where it’s at — and I don’t have the stats before me to back this up — it’s probably been the highest it’s been for some time.”

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver recently reported an 11 per cent rise in home prices in July.

Homebuilder Ivan Krpan added the spike is a result of the market and added the proposed changes to residential zoning bylaws are minor.

“There are few lots available in the market right now,” said Krpan, noting builders are earnestly seeking old homes for rebuilds.

Vancouver’s booming real estate industry is being targeted in a federal money-laundering audit that could potentially lead to massive fines and jail time for realtors.

Ottawa’s increased examination of Vancouver real estate deals has been under way for several months and has been revealed in a Province investigation that obtained rare internal data and risk-analysis reports from Canada’s financial intelligence unit, Fintrac.

Documents obtained under access to information law — and The Province’s interviews with a wide array of B.C. real estate professionals, money laundering experts and Fintrac officials — suggest dramatic under-reporting of large cash transactions and suspicious transactions that realtors and developers are responsible to make to the federal government.

“We have significantly increased our examinations in the Vancouver area,” a Fintrac official said. “Our compliance people are not happy.”

The Vancouver audit comes in the context of Fintrac documents that state Canada’s real estate sector is seen as “higher risk” for money laundering than all other sectors — such as banks, casinos, and money wiring services — that are required to report to Fintrac to combat money laundering.

These professionals must file reports for cash transactions over $10,000, and more importantly from Fintrac’s perspective, suspicious transactions.

Fintrac contracted Toronto accounting firm Grant Thornton to investigate all reporting sectors in 2014, but asked the firm to prioritize the real estate sector. Specific money laundering risks in Canadian real estate, according to the independent report obtained by The Province, include buyer concealment loopholes involving lawyers and legal trust funds, a “high number of cash transactions” and a lack of “quality or ethics infrastructure,” and “disengagement” with compliance rules.

“The purchase of Canadian real estate assets with offshore money and or by offshore persons was noted as a significant risk factor,” the report said.

Despite these alleged risks, data obtained by The Province shows that from January 2012 through May 2015 only two large cash transaction reports and five suspicious transaction reports were filed by realtors to Fintrac in the surging Vancouver, Richmond, West Vancouver and North Vancouver property markets.

In comparison, in that time period financial institutions in Vancouver reported 1,278,804 large cash transactions, and 8,246 suspicious transactions, according to Fintrac data. Fintrac is satisfied with reporting compliance from financial institutions, an official said. However, internal Fintrac documents say that banks are erring by not scrutinizing real estate as a high-risk money-laundering sector.

A previous investigation by The Province showed Vancouver’s airport leads North America by a wide margin in the millions of undeclared cash seized from Chinese citizens.

Canadian Border Services data showed that between June 2012 and December 2014 about $10 million in undeclared cash was discovered and then returned to Chinese citizens at YVR.

Experts told The Province those figures represent a fraction of the illicit money from China believed to be pouring into B.C. to be laundered in real estate, in the wake of an aggressive Chinese Communist Party anti-corruption campaign.

The same experts have told The Province that the two large cash transactions reported by Vancouver-area realtors do not add up with anecdotal reports of large cash buys taking place.

Kim Marsh, a private money laundering investigator and former RCMP international crime unit boss who tracks dirty money in Vancouver property for Chinese institutions that want to recover laundered assets, told The Province he currently has at least seven large cash transaction investigations open, compared to the two reports made since 2012 by Vancouver realtors. One file involves four expensive homes purchased for a Chinese buyer in Richmond through a Chinese lawyer within eight weeks, in 2014.

“Why weren’t they reported?” Marsh said.

“For Vancouver realtors to only file seven reports to Fintrac since 2012, that is suspicious,” said Ross Kay, a former realtor who now is a real estate consultant in Ontario.

However, the B.C. real estate industry argues that Fintrac has not provided any evidence of money-laundering risk or large cash transactions taking place in B.C., and that most realtors no longer handle cash over $10,000 because lawyers and notaries almost always handle the large sums in real estate deals. Lawyers are shielded from Fintrac reporting laws.

“I can only speak to what my brokerage does,” said Scott Russell, president of the B.C. Real Estate Association, who owns a Richmond brokerage. “And other brokerages I know don’t accept cash, so that could be the reason.”

Regarding suspicious transaction reporting, Russell said he was aware of Fintrac’s website guidelines but was hard pressed to think of red flags that would trigger a report with Fintrac.

“I’m trying to think of something,” he said. “We offer a level of protection because we don’t handle the cash, so I’m kind of challenged by it.”

Russell said Canadian realtors want to comply with Fintrac, but the government has not been good about consulting with the industry.

“We’re hearing that we are a targeted industry, so from my position, if it is more clear about where we are failing, then let us know,” Russell said. “You certainly have some information that I wasn’t aware of.”

The Province’s investigation, in a number of interviews with B.C. realtors, found a vast disconnect between the industry’s understanding of Fintrac’s legal expectations and the reporting regulations outlined on Fintrac’s website.

If realtors fail to report large cash transactions or suspicious deals they can be fined $500,000 per instance and face five-year jail terms, if they are found to be criminally complicit. But suspicious transaction report filing does not even seem to be on B.C. realtors’ radar.

Most realtors told The Province they believed they were fulfilling obligations by filing “Fintrac” forms for every deal with their brokerages. In these forms realtors attempt to verify the client’s identity and principal form of business.

However, this basic level of record keeping “is just a client ID and not a Fintrac report,” a Fintrac official told The Province.

Some realtors acknowledged they are not incentivized to probe deals.

“It would be very easy to fool an agent,” one experienced realtor told The Province. “We are busy by nature and we live off commissions. How much time would you spend investigating identity, profession, and source of income?”

Another prominent realtor with a large firm that markets Vancouver homes mostly to buyers from China said he understands his obligation with Fintrac is to simply file brokerage client identification forms based “on what we are told” and that the responsibility for determining whether the client information is true or false falls to Canadian government agencies.

Another brokerage manager said Fintrac’s reporting requirements are onerous and its website is flawed, and he claimed to have only ever met one B.C. brokerage manager who has filed a suspicious transaction report.

He said most brokerage managers are unaware of Fintrac’s website and its exhaustive list of red flags for fishy deals.

Fintrac’s website instructions state that if a realtor has a reasonable suspicion that questionable money is involved in a deal, it doesn’t matter if the realtor handles any money, how much the deal is for, or if the realtor receives a commission — the deal must be reported.

The manager criticized a lack of money-laundering prosecutions and fines made by Fintrac, while realtors have filed “millions of pages of forms that no one will ever see.”

“If the public knew how ineffective and costly Fintrac is, they would riot,” the manager said. He said he did not want to be named because “it would probably result in a Fintrac audit.”

Of about 100,000 realtors operating across Canada, Fintrac has fined only seven realtors, for about $10,000 in each case, an official confirmed.

Kay, the Ontario-based consultant, said he believes B.C. realtors are trying to steer attention away from suspicious transaction reporting requirements by claiming they never handle cash over $10,000. In Kay’s opinion, many of the residential property investment deals reportedly occurring in the Vancouver area would clearly include red flags.

“I’m shocked if B.C. realtors don’t get this,” Kay said. “My argument is that a non-Canadian buyer would meet so many of the warnings included in the Fintrac guide that it would be practically impossible not to report.”

A Fintrac official said part of the reason Vancouver is being probed is “the result of what we are seeing in the public environment there.”

“Our compliance people are saying, ‘We’ve tried to do a lot in educational awareness, and we have a lot more to do. And at the same time we’re glad examinations are ramping up.’

TRINITY, Fla. - Seven years after the real estate bust in the U.S., many people who lost their homes have rebuilt their credit and are jumping back into the market.

Called "boomerang buyers," experts say this group will be an important part of the real estate market in the coming years.

About 700,000 of the 7.3 million homeowners who went through foreclosures or short sales during the bust have the potential to get a mortgage again this year.

A Realty Trac report earlier this year predicts Phoenix and Miami will see the most boomerang buyers. The Tampa area is in the top 10 cities. In some markets, such as Las Vegas, as many as quarter of homes could be bought by boomerang buyers.