Pools, walking paths, gazebos, hot tubs, hair salons, and parking stalls – builders create a workable wish list of amenities from a number of factors.

“We determine what the customers want, and then determine where we can make it work,” says Brad Milne, Vice President & General Counsel for Statesman. “There may be some instances where it’s not possible.”

Architects take their direction from the marketing side of the development, which is directly tied to the demographic they’re marketing to. The builder begins with market research, but the experience of being in the business for a while gives them a feel for what works. Essentially, the builder will look at what the customer is willing to pay for.

Milne adds, “It’s not just the cost to build it, it’s the cost to maintain it. With the Condominium Property Act, you’ve got to disclose to the customer what you think the condo fees are going to be. You’ve got to make your best reasonable guess.”

Builders are required to do a reserve fund study within two years of filing the condominium plan. They have to project what the repair and replacement costs are going to be over a 25-year period. The study would look at all aspects of a building. For example, while you’re not heating a parking garage to the same temperature as you would heat the units, there is some energy loss, and you still have to clean it every so often. You get into higher expenses when manpower is needed to maintain something.

When it comes to parking, where a home might be within 200 metres of an LRT station, that customers’ demands are going to be different than those from an outlying area, where there is no LRT and limited bus service.

“There is a definite correlation between the amount of parking that is demanded and the price or square footage of the unit itself,” observes Milne. Upper end lifestyle customers will likely pay for extra parking if they have two vehicles. But if you did the same thing in a higher density location, where there was exceptional transit service, there would be lots of stalls left over. “When people buy in that location, they’re buying the convenience of everything around them.”

Right now the city requires builders to provide 1.05 parking stalls per unit plus another .15 for visitors. With the new bylaw coming into effect next year, depending on the area of the city, that will increase to 1.25 plus an additional .15 for visitors. The closer you build downtown, the lower the parking requirement.

There are construction considerations that go into building amenities. Don Dessario, Partner with Poon McKenzie Architects explains, “As part of a public space, they quite often have higher resistance separation requirement.

Depending on what the amenity is, they may require specific structural capacity, for example hot tubs and pools, any of those will often require an increase in the structural capability plus access to services (like plumbing) and ventilation for exercise facilities. Ultimately, they represent an increase in cost to the project, but at the end of the day, they become a marketing tool.

“Amenities can go from one extreme to the other. The biggest challenge is to put them in at a size so it doesn’t appear that they’re token, that they are functional spaces. It’s one thing to sell an amenity. It’s another to keep it reasonably priced. The bigger your common area is, the bigger your condominium property fees have to be.”

Milne concludes, “You look at what the customer wants in the building, and when you look at all the other constraints from a development point of view, from a safety point of view, engineering, what the city requires, the fire act, and it presents a real conundrum for us. At some point, those constraints become so overwhelming, the only way to build what people want to buy is at a price they’re not willing to pay for. If you have to go down that second parkade level, the cost of building a parking stall doubles, and then all of a sudden, people aren’t willing to purchase that extra. It really is a balancing act. When you look at the cumulative effect of it, it can get to the point, all of a sudden, you’re not able to provide the consumer with what they’re intent on buying.”