Today, instead of our usual Sooke REALTOR® tour where we go around to the new listings in Sooke, we had a bus take us out to Port Renfrew for a tour of Three Point Properties‘ new Wild Coast Cottages development. The roughly one hour drive along Highway 14 is entirely different when you’re not driving – lots more time to look around at the absolutely stunning scenery around you: creeks, waterfalls, tall trees, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Olympic Mountains in the background. We even saw three black bears along the roadside.
Arriving on site we found a hub of activity – excavators, builders, trucks, and other workers getting the site ready. Title registration for the first purchasers should be coming in the middle of August. There are already two cottages at the site, one of each floor plan that they’re offering at the moment.
Wild Coast Cottages is more that your average cottage country development. With the usually high cost of recreational property, Three Point is trying to do something different – to keep these architecturally designed west-coast style cottages within reach of the average buyer. To do this has taken innovation for sure. Port Renfrew is pretty remote, and only has a population of about 200 residents. There are no hardware stores, building supply outfits, or large construction companies. So, instead of building the cottages on site, they are framed, built and completely finished, right down to the designer paint colours, 70 kilometres away in Sooke, and trucked up to Renfrew on a flatbed. This enables the builder to save on travel costs, and allows some economies of scale to be realized by “mass-producing” these cottages all in one place.
The current phase has 24 lots out of the 40 planned, and Three Point has more property in the area that they plan to develop similarly. The property is waterfront, and the cottage owners will have access to a boardwalk and a marina.
The cottages are small – around 400 sq ft, one bedroom and one bathroom. Furnished properly, they will easily sleep a family or group of 4. The two designs they had on site were lovely. One features a breezeway type covered deck joining the living space and the sleeping space and bathroom, and the other was a more traditional layout with everything together and a large deck out front. Finishing is impressive with natural-stained cedar, hardi-board type siding, pitched 50-year metal roofs, and high-end long-lasting composite decking material. These solid units are built to last, and built to withstand the bumpy ride from Sooke to Port Renfrew! The builder boasted that not even a crack in the finished drywall was evident after the transport of the finished cottage to the site.
Overall, I was impressed. I was curious about this project since I first heard about it. Starting at $130,000 and ranging to $160,000 I think the price point is right on. There’s no way you could have a cottage built on a lot for that price, and certainly not a fully serviced (underground wiring, city water, common sewage disposal) lot on a waterfront development.
I won’t be surprised when Three Point sells this phase out.
–Tim Ayres – Sooke Real Estate Professional
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Sounds great! Must see it!