Calgary-based Deville Coffee will soon make a splashy arrival in Vancouver, marking a major expansion of the brand.

Paul Brassard and Mark Nolan opened Calgary's first Deville cafe in 2008. The chain has a major presence in Calgary, with a dozen locations around the city and a thirteenth one in the works for Calgary’s airport. Deville also has an outlet in Edmonton and one in Kelowna, B.C.

In Vancouver, Deville has announced four outposts: 745 Thurlow (at the 745 Thurlow office building); The Post (in the former Canada Post redevelopment on West Georgia Street in the downtown); Bentall 5; and Waterfront (at 333 Seymour Street).

It appears the Waterfront location will be the first to open its doors this July, though a specific date has not yet been shared on Deville's social media.

Jason Cunningham, co-founder of 98 Food Co., which is Deville’s franchisor, said a Deville Coffee franchise costs $25,000 and a turnkey location can run between 500 square feet and 1,500 square feet, and cost up to $375,000. However, not all locations look the same.

“We build stores to suit the neighbourhood, and the building we are located in,” says Cunningham. “It’s not a cookie-cutter approach.”

It's unclear so far which Vancouver bakers, if any, Deville will be working with for their cafe's food selections. 

As a ­­­­commercial tenant, the monthly base rent you pay your landlord for leasing commercial space may not be the only rent you pay! Many commercial tenants will also pay a secondary amount for property operating costs. The good news is that both these rents are often negotiable. 

What Do I Pay for When I Pay Operating Costs?

To clarify, operating costs (also referred to as Common Area Maintenance/CAM, Triple Net/NNN Charges, or Additional Rent) are the costs of maintaining and managing a property. Examples of valid operating costs include property taxes, property insurance, maintenance, utilities, landscaping (which includes snow removal), and garbage collection. Valid operating costs will benefit all of the tenants in a commercial property—not just one or two. Commercial tenants need to understand and remember that operating costs are charged proportionately to all tenants. Therefore, a tenant occupying seven percent of a commercial property will, typically, pay seven percent of the total operating costs.

Operating costs are not, however, used equally. For instance, we are familiar with one tenant who created only one bag of garbage per week. He chose to load this bag into his own van, take it home, and place it outside with his own trash. Despite this, he was still obligated to pay his proportionate share of operating costs. In this case, it may be possible to exclude these charges for an individual tenant who can argue they are receiving no benefits from such operating costs.

What Shouldn’t I Be Paying For?

Any costs that are not covered by the commercial tenant’s contribution to Operating Expenses become the responsibility of the landlord. Understandably, landlords want to ensure that tenants’ fees cover all the building costs. What is wrong, however, is when all the tenants within a commercial property are paying needlessly to subsidize capital improvements on the building. The capital improvements costs could mean the construction of a new building or the installation of new pylon signs on a property when none existed before.

Another common scenario when operating costs can increase dramatically is when a new landlord purchases a building that has a large amount of deferred maintenance to be completed. The landlord’s motivation to complete this maintenance is to charge higher rents and fill vacancies, but this comes at the expense of higher operating costs for the current tenants. Commercial tenants should be looking at other similar buildings in the area to compare operating costs. If operating costs at one particular building are quite low and the property appears in need of updating, it is reasonable that these costs may rise significantly in the future.

How Do I Protect Myself from Paying Too Much?

A commercial property’s operating costs need to be completely spelled out in a tenant’s lease agreement. When this occurs, a tenant can examine, question, and negotiate each listed item. Beware that commercial landlords can be quite creative when it comes to listing operating costs. We have seen cases where landlords require all of their tenants to pay an annual fee to have a pool of money available for damage not covered by insurance. In most of these cases, the tenants were required to pay this fee for the entire duration of their tenancy. If damage occurs during a tenancy, a landlord will tap into this reserve fund; if a tenant relocates, the money that he/she paid into the pool will not be refundable.

When a building is fully occupied (or close to fully occupied), the landlord may be less motivated to try to charge their tenants more than their fair share. Before signing the lease, a tenant must ensure that there is no language within the lease permitting the landlord to charge back shares of operating costs for any vacancies to the tenants currently occupying the property. Even if your lease does not permit this, tenants must review their Operating Statements closely every year to ensure that they are not absorbing operating costs that should be attributed to any vacancies.

When it comes to deciphering operating costs, read carefully! These are a few of the potentially detrimental issues that can negatively affect commercial tenants: 

• Administration/Management Fees: If tenants are paying the property manager’s salary through operating costs, but the landlord adds a further 15 percent management fee to CAM costs, this can be considered double-dipping (or double-billing for essentially the same service). If the landlord levies administration fees on property taxes and/or insurance, it may be possible to exclude these items from the fee as there is very little landlord’s administrative work involved with these.
• Utilities: Electricity, natural gas, and water may be provided by the landlord or be separately metered for each tenant. In some cases, the landlord may have one meter on the property and a check meter on each tenant’s unit to measure consumption. If you’re paying your own utilities to the utility company, you’ll have your own meter. Often, the landlord bills back utilities to tenants in operating costs. Make sure that you know in advance what your lease agreement calls for so you don’t pay twice.
• Tenant Audit Rights: The landlord has a fiduciary responsibility for accountability to the tenants for the money collected from and spent on behalf of the tenants. Your lease should include tenant audit rights which allow you to examine the landlord’s books, if necessary.

In Canada’s top beach destination of Tofino, B.C., recreational vehicle (RV) owners have the option renting a weekend spot at the Surf Grove campground, while others can rent RV from $150 to $250 per night.

RV sites have been offered for sale in lakefront parks from Cultus Lake to the Cariboo and in the Thompson-Okanagan, such as at Mara Lake and Shuswap Lake, for many years.

But the boom in RV sales since the start of the pandemic has created a surge in the creation of parks specializing in RV real estate. In the U.S., massive RV campgrounds have emerged, such as the 2,500-pad, 700-acre gated Port Susan Camping Club in. Tulalip, Washington, where memberships start at US$34,900.
The Canadian RV Association reports demand for new vehicles outstripped supply over the first six months 2021 — Canadian dealers sold 30,376 vehicles, while U.S. manufacturers shipped another 30,102 north of the border.

In the U.S., RV retail sales are on a record pace, according to RVBusiness magazine’s most recent market report. In 2020, the U.S. industry sold 520,075 vehicles, while in the first six months of last year 325,032 units sold.

In pre-COVID 2019, the U.S. RV industry sold 463,941 units.

The industry is expecting another surge in 2022, as effects of the pandemic linger and ­newcomers to RVing consider trading up their vehicles.

Prices for Class A diesel motorhomes start at $350,000, according to the Canadian Recreation Vehicle Association, but new smaller Class B and C units sell from $60,000 and used units sell from $10,000. New fifth-wheel trailers are priced from $50,000 to $160,000.

Today the average size of an RV on western roads is 40 feet long and 13 feet wide – twice the size of such vehicles two decades ago – and they are often rigged out with furnishings, TVs and complete kitchens.

The problem is where to park for the average 4.5 annual camping trips that owners use them. While there are public campgrounds, about 25 per cent of owners wheel into private campsites, and this is where recreational real estate investors can make money.

“RV units are getting better, made with more conveniences and there are great finance plans to purchase. Lots of units are being sold every day,” said Rudy Nielsen, president of the Niho Group, which includes LandQuest Realty that has been involved in selling B.C. recreational land for decades. “You might have an RV unit, but unless you book well into advance a place at a private or government campsite in summer you have nowhere to go.”

Shane Styles, president of Epic Real Estate Solutions in Kelowna, has seen the rising sales of RV’s, mostly large fifth-wheel units, and he says the demand for purchasing a permanent RV camping spot is a natural progression. He explained that a lack of rentable camping spots, record high prices for fuel, the cost of seasonal storage of an RV and an opportunity to recoup the cost of an RV investment are all playing into the demand for RV strata lots.
He said owning a strata site in an RV park allows the unit to stay securely in one place year-round and to be rented out when not in use. In some cases, people have made a large RV their permanent residence.

One of the largest and newest RV parks in B.C. is The Shores, a 389-pad RV resort being developed at Old Town Bay at Sicamous on Shuswsap Lake in the eastern Okanagan. The RV resort will be equipped with a swimming pool, community centre and a waterfront beach location, all part of a 210-acre development that includes separate parcels for single-detached and strata homes.

The “five-star” RV resort has access to Shuswap Lake and the Eagle River, according to real estate agent Zane Bouvette, who is working with developer Gary Tebbutt of Compass Developments on the project.

Bouvette said the RV strata lots at the Shores are priced from $185,000 for a 2,600-square-foot pad and up to $225,000 for a lot of around 3,400 square feet.

There is also the potential for investors to purchase existing campgrounds and convert some of the land to strata RV lots.  In some locations, such as Kamloops and the North, there is the potential of renting strata RVs to resource construction workers as well as tourists.  An example of a listing is a 60-pad RV park at Charlie Lake near Fort St. John in north east B.C., the centre of Canada’s liquefied natural gas industry.

“Contract and construction workers ensure income in the low season,” noted Kathy Miller of Re/Max Commercial, who has the campground listed for $8.8 million.

3AGroup Re/Max Nyda, of Agassiz, B.C., has a 98-acre RV park and campground, which includes a store and gas station, for sale at Baker Creek, B C. in the Cariboo for $1.37 million.