CHANCELLOR Tower, Metrotown - the madness begins. Will POLYGON do as good a job with the queue as BOSA SOVEREIGN ?

The CHANCELLOR Tower building site, 4860 Bennett Street, Metrotown. It's April 10th, at 3PM. Realtors have hired these placeholders to stand in line in April showers - for the coming week! The City of Burnaby has deployed plastic barriers to keep passing traffic from hitting pedestrians heading for the Mall or Bonsor Community Centre. The sidewalk is fully covered by real estate squatters.

It was 3PM and I was standing in the pouring rain in Metrotown. My camera didn't like the weather so I had to be fast. Approximately 40 Chinese men and women, many middle aged, covered the sidewalk sheltering under umbrellas or barbecue shelters in front of POLYGON's building site at 4860 Bennett Street, Burnaby Metrotown. An elderly gentleman approached to ask why I was taking photos. He had been here awhile, and was a wealth of information. The line he said, began to form on Saturday. He had counted approximately 100 chairs and stools deployed from the front door of the newly constructed CHANCELLOR Sales Centre to the corner, of which 75 or so have Realtor business cards affixed. He had spoken to several umbrella people in the queue, and all had been promised money by Realtors to stand in line. I photographed a few of the business cards.

These are two of the Realtor business cards taped to chairs at 4860 Bennett Street.

Last month I witnessed the chilled lineup of placeholders in front of SOVEREIGN Tower, Metrotown. BOSA did a superb job with crowd control, before the jostling and angry words could turn uglier. POLYGON will have to hustle because this crowd has assembled much earlier, and so many realtors missed out on selling anything at SOVEREIGN and METROPLACE Towers, that there is a great deal of "face" at stake with exasperated clients.

Taping your business card to a plastic kitchen stool, and lining them up in front of a major developer's sales centre - ONE WEEK BEFORE SALE DATE. Is that all it takes these days to guarantee the chance of writing a contract with condo sales staff?

In my opinion, the extraordinary demand for units in these large tower projects in Metrotown, is encouraging a "feeding frenzy" style of marketing which the City of Burnaby should have foreseen, and which certainly is getting out of hand. (Yesterday's frenzy at METROPLACE was nothing short of bizarre! as were the secret sales the night before.) That left many shaking heads. We are in dire need of municipal Bylaws to govern flash condo sales on this scale. The word of mouth around Burnaby is that Developer Tactics and the Municipal responsibility to manage the boom in Metrotown development, will certainly be an ELECTION ISSUE in 2011.

V for Victory. These happy place-holders are close to the front of the line at the CHANCELLOR building site, in Metrotown.

City of Burnaby employees have deployed plastic barriers to create a space for Metrotown pedestrians to walk around the hundred or so place-holders who have taken the sidewalk. This is a very busy block, and the entrance to Metrotown parking is directly across the street from these ladies.

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