VancouverGo.com - your Vancouver BC Canada online information hub

A developer in Richmond is selling his 22,000 square foot country style manor home, on 20 acres of property, for a cool $24 million.Called “Ivy Manor,” the property boasts a proper English garden landscaped for horseback riding, a barn with stalls for five horses, a five-pin bowling alley, and a six-car garage.

It isn’t the most expensive property for sale in BC. A waterfront mansion in Oak Bay near Victoria has that honour. It’s listed for $29 million.

From http://www.news1130.com/news/local

Developer Milan Ilich is attempting to notch a new entry in Vancouver’s ultra high-end real estate market by listing his and his wife Maureen’s equestrian estate property, known as Ivy Manor, for $24 million.

The property, which realtor Jamie MacDougal plans to have on the Multiple Listing Service by the end of the week, comprises a 22,000-square-foot country manor-style home set on 20 acres, half of which is landscaped into a lavishly manicured English garden, and half that has been groomed for equestrian use.

An immaculate barn with stalls for five horses is one of the buildings located on the property, situated past the Steveston Highway at the bucolic end of No. 3 Road in Richmond.

A $24-million price wouldn’t be out of the question for an estate property the size of Ivy Manor, according to Malcolm Hasman, one of Vancouver’s leading realtors in the luxury market.

Hasman, who is with Angell & Hasman Associates in West Vancouver, wasn’t yet aware of this specific listing, but noted “there are so few large estate properties for sale in the Lower Mainland, it would not surprise me if an out-of-country buyer purchased it.”

While Vancouver’s overall real estate market is slowing down, the upper echelon he operates in, and where the Ivy Manor is situated, remains brisk, Hasman added.

“There’s no question the real estate market is going through a change,” he said, with sales slowing and prices “set too high at unrealistic levels” being readjusted.

However, he still sees significant numbers of high-net-worth buyers being drawn to Vancouver, many of them from Mainland China.

“They still see incredible value in [Vancouver] properties at current prices compared to other cities in North America,” Hasman explained.

Currently, there are 65 homes in B.C. listed at prices above $7.5 million, the most expensive a $29-million waterfront mansion in Oak Bay near Victoria.

Just in the last week, Hasman said, Vancouver has seen two sales in the $10-million-or-over range.

read more - http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news

photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancouvergo/2215454721/

BC is about to get a little more green. The Province is planning to invest $5 million in a new program to boost the use of solar heating.According to the Vancouver Sun, people who install the technology in their homes will be eligible for up to $1,600 in government rebates.

By 2020, Victoria hopes to have solar panels installed on 100,000 roofs across the province.

From http://www.news1130.com/news/local

photo from http://flickr.com/photos/dtes_people/2555805736/

The B.C. Liberal party candidate in Vancouver–Mount Pleasant, where Vancouver’s supervised injection site is located, wants drug addicts taken away to an “island”.

There, according to Stephen Chong, addicts could get training so they could later get jobs. “After they have finished their term, they can come out and they have their own skill,” Chong told the Georgia Straight by phone. “That’s what I want.”

The 67-year-old retired businessman and former TransLink bus driver, who was acclaimed as the Liberal candidate on July 3, said that continuing to allow addicts to inject drugs “will kill them in the long run”.

But Chong said that “if you cannot get a place for them [addicts]”, he prefers to see injection sites in each riding, not just in Chinatown. That way, “they have a choice” where to go, he said.

Still, he considers moving Insite away from Chinatown a “good” idea, a measure that he deemed “possible”. He said, “I prefer it further out in the city.”

read more - http://www.straight.com

Diana O’Brien, 22, of Saltspring Island, B.C., was found dead in her apartment building in Shanghai on Monday. (CBC)

Friends of a B.C. model killed in Shanghai said they have doubts about the story told by an 18-year-old Chinese man who confessed to stalking and slaying her.

Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, reported Friday that Chen Jun was arrested in Xuancheng City, several hundred kilometres west of Shanghai, around 8:15 a.m. local time.

Diana O’Brien, 22, of Saltspring Island, B.C., was found dead in her apartment building in Shanghai on Monday, two weeks after leaving for Shanghai for a three-month modelling contract with a talent agency.

Chinese police said Chen confessed to following O’Brien into her apartment Sunday night with the intention of robbing her and killed her when she resisted. The suspect then fled to another city in a nearby province before leaving for Xuancheng City, according to police.

However, some of O’Brien’s friends told CBC News on Friday that she would have run if threatened and would not have tried to protect her possessions.

While the investigation in China continues, Joel Berry, O’Brien’s boyfriend of five years, said he just wanted to bring her body home.

“Hopefully it’s just one more step closer to her coming home,” Berry said of the arrest of the suspect.

“It’s kind of tough to plan a memorial for her when you don’t really know where she is and how close she is to coming home,” he said Friday.

“It just seems like we’re so out of touch with it and helpless really. So, I think, just to have her back would kind of empower us a little bit and [we’ll be] able to find some closure

Earlier reports from those who discovered the body said O’Brien was stabbed and found lying in a pool of blood in the apartment building’s stairwell, but police did not disclose the cause of death.

Chinese police said Friday their initial investigation shows the suspect’s motive was money, according to Xinhua. It happened that O’Brien was home so they ran into one another and a botched robbery turned deadly, the news agency said.

Police said they found a laptop and other articles belonging to O’Brien, according to Xinhua.

O’Brien had been in China since mid-June after landing a contract with Jh Model Agency in Shanghai. The agency appears to have vanished since news of her death. No such name could be found at the listed address and the company’s website has been inaccessible.

One of the woman’s friends alleged O’Brien had been stalked by a Chinese man she met during a modelling job about a week before she was found dead. It’s unclear whether the suspect is the same man her friend mentioned.

Read more - http://www.cbc.ca

Police describe B.C. model’s slaying

Police formally charged the suspect in B.C. model Diana O’Brien’s murder this weekend, saying that her camera and jewelry were in his possession when they arrested him 10 days ago.

They said Chen Jun, 18, “stabbed her heart and liver” during a botched robbery.

According to police, the accused confessed that on July 7 around 11 p.m. local time he followed O’Brien into the Changning District apartment building in central Shanghai, where she had lived since arriving in the city two weeks earlier.

Chen told police the apartment door was unlocked so he rushed in, apparently hoping to grab her valuables and run, but O’Brien, 22, resisted. A struggle followed and he killed her.

Witnesses said earlier the model was stabbed multiple times and that there was a trail of blood leading from her apartment to the stairwell where her body was found several hours later.

Police did not reveal anything about that in the official statement. They made no mention of whether she tried to flee the scene or whether Chen moved the body in an attempt to cover his tracks.

When police caught up with Chen in his hometown of Xuancheng in Anhui province, hundreds of kilometres from Shanghai, they said, he had a rolling suitcase containing O’Brien’s digital camera, two mobile phones, one necklace, two bracelets and three rings.

It is rare for a foreigner to be murdered in China and Chen will likely face the death penalty if he is convicted.

From http://www.canada.com

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancouvergo/575927900

The Cambie Village Business Association has decided to seek over $20 million in compensation for what a local merchant calls “an appalling tragedy.” “There’s hundreds of businesses along the Canada Line, and many have already been forced out of business and many have already failed and I think that’s just an appalling tragedy. It’s something that was entirely preventable,” said association member and Cambie Street business owner, Susan Heyes.“I don’t think that there’s any possible way that they can deny the impact that this has had; the disruption to our lives has been unprecedented.”

After remortgaging her home twice and losing more than half a million dollars in revenue due to construction, Heyes said legal action is the only remaining option for her and other small business owners.

“This is not loss of profit, this is eating into all the equity that I’ve built up in my business over decades … I’ve poured a fabulously sound foundation for my business and they’ve been consistently just jack-hammering it away.”

While Heyes’ case will return to court in November, she said the association is currently deciding what to include in their statement of claim.

A Canadian businessman who spent a dozen years in a Bulgarian prison arrived in Vancouver late Sunday, and hugged the son he never got to see grow up.

Michael Kapoustin, 55, from the Penticton, B.C. area, has been imprisoned since the mid-1990s on fraud charges that he has denied committing.

“There are no words to express my feelings right now. Joy. It’s the end of a 13-year nightmare,” said Kapoustin during a stopover in Toronto earlier in the day.

“You have to imagine one-fourth of your life going by in a country where you don’t speak the language, and you don’t have contact with family. You’re solitary; you’re beaten,” he said.

“It’s been an experience and it almost feels like it happened to someone else.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally called the Bulgarian president in 2006 to ask for Kapoustin’s release to Canada.

Conservative MP and secretary of state for multiculturalism Jason Kenney visited Bulgaria last year for three days to work for Kapoustin’s release.

Kenney spoke to CTV Newsnet and said the way Kapoustin’s case was handled raised a number of flags for him.

“He had not (had the) benefit of basic due process or natural justice in the way his case had been handled,” he said Sunday.

Kapoustin spent five years in pre-trial custody and was originally acquitted. But an appeal court convicted him of a charge that he had not originally been charged with, he said.

Kenney added there are thousands of Canadians in legal trouble abroad and that working through each case takes time.

“We treat each consular case on an individual basis,” said Kenney, who was contacted by the man’s family about his plight several years ago.

“Sometimes these cases are fairly straightforward, and others a lot more complicated.”

The court found Kapoustin guilty of embezzling about $4 million in 1994 and 1995 from Bulgarian investors.

He has maintained his innocence.

From http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca