Orchard House tower is a leasehold residential building of 211 suites located at 647 Michigan Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8V 1S9. The building is not a condominium. Suite lessees are tenants who pre-paid the rent for—or if you’re in the market, can buy resale—the remaining years of a suite’s 99-year lease assignment, expiring at year’s end, 2073. The building and land are owned and operated (poorly, in my opinion as a former multi-suite owner and condominium board chair) by Westsea Construction with lessees/tenants covering operating costs and capital costs for refurbishment. In news reports, the Times-Colonist usually confuses leasehold and condominium, which is a different animal. I corrected one such reference in a letter-to-the-Editor in September of 2019, which you can read here (links open a new browser tab) Letter to T-C 13 Sept 2019 . The 99-year lease can be found here OH Head Lease from LTO . More detail about buying a suite assignment and being a lessee is on the page Buy at O.H.?
The lease does not allow for Westsea to profit from the building’s operation; the owner opted to take its revenue in a lump sum by selling 99 years of tenancy of each suite, and the owner can profit again when the head lease expires, at which time Orchard House (and about 20 others like it) can become rental buildings or be sold as condominium suites. Of course the building owner can profit from suites (16 or so) to which it retained the lease assignment and which it rents to tenants, but otherwise leaseholds like this should be break-even operations during the lease duration.
The building’s office number is 250-383-1185, week days 8 a.m. through 4 p.m., and the email address is OrchardHouse@westsea.ca The site manager is Gary Rogers, with after-hours and weekend emergency calls taken by Don, the resident weekend manager.
To avoid movers knocking over people coming and going via the front door, moves must use the east-side door. The padded elevator must be booked in advance for moves, which may not use the other elevators. If you are writing the required cheques (remember those?) for monthly suite fees, the company’s code for the building is 0364, plus your suite number in four digits, so put a “0” in front if it’s only three digits: 0364-0102, using suite #102 as a random example.
The City approved construction of Orchard House in 1968, announced in The Daily Colonist of December 14, 1968 under the headline “Bonus Plan Allows Tall Tower” on the front of the Local News section (p. 21), which you can view here O.H. to be built news clips . The rental tower was completed late in 1969 or during 1970. The building of this and other massive apartment towers in James Bay, replacing historic homes, caused an outcry that eventually led to “down zoning” of the area. For a few decades Orchard House was Victoria’s tallest building with its 22 floors, although these are numbered to 23 because the number 13 was omitted.
In May of 1974 builder/owner George Mulek was apparently frustrated by the first-ever NDP government’s rent controls and prohibition on converting rental buildings to condominiums, so he signed a lease between two companies that he owned to make possible the assignment of the lease to individual suite “buyers” for 99 years, which was controversial from the start. A news story in The Daily Colonist on August 24 of 1974 was headlined “Firm denies using lease loophole”, which you can see here (scroll down in the document to find an easy-to-read typed copy of the story) O.H. news clip plus text re deny loophole . Newspaper ads were soon marketing suites with 90% financing, but saying nothing about their leasehold nature O.H. sales ad 1975 . For more history about the troubled experience of leaseholds, turn to this site’s page titled We need protection by statute!.
Today’s buyers of a suite’s remaining years of lease assignment should keep in mind that these all expire at year’s end, 2073. Buyers of an assignment pay B.C.’s property-transfer tax, but on the other hand qualify for the annual B.C. homeowner grant. Because suites are leased, and not owned by leaseholders, the building has a single property title. The tax-assessment value of the tower and its land for 2024 is $55.4 million, which is a lot, but divided by 211 suites equals assessed value of only $263,600 per suite, which is about half of Victoria’s condo suite averages. Each suite pays its share of the property tax –less the homeowner grant for those who qualify–rolled into the monthly suite fee.
Those monthly operating fees are charged to suites in proportion to the floor area of each. As it is not yet in the twenty-first century, Westsea has no options for monthly pre-authorized debit or Interac payments; only paper cheques are accepted. There is no mechanism under the Orchard House lease to establish a reserve fund for major expenses, some of which have been major, indeed.
The tower’s floor plan is almost identical on levels three through 23 with 10 suites per floor. An excerpt from the intended condo plan survey shows each suite’s boundaries, not the divisions inside each suite: floor plan 23rd floor . The main floor has only two suites in addition to the lobby, the site office, mailboxes, a laundry room and two locker areas. There are more lockers on the basement level, which also houses a hot tub, available 9 a.m.–9 p.m. when it works. On the second floor an ’08-plan studio suite is omitted to accommodate access to the outdoor swimming pool and two change rooms with small saunas. On the plan, note that suite floor areas include the roomy balconies and are measured to the exterior of outside walls and midpoint of interior walls, so true square footage is perhaps 15% less than stated.
Two-bedroom suites are numbered ’05 and ’10, are on NE and SW building corners with a dining-area window, and those on alternating floors have a second half bathroom. One-bedroom suites are numbered ’01, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’06 and ’09. Of these, the one-bedroom suites numbered ’01 (NW corner) and ’06 (SE corner) have a dining/kitchen window. Studio suites are numbered ’07 and ’08; these offer 450 square feet of wide-open space best furnished with a fold-up wall bed.
About 80 suites are lessee-occupied, which is as close as we come to “owner occupied”. Westsea Construction itself retains the lease assignment to 16 suites, one being the owner’s suite, one assigned to the resident manager, and the rest rented out along with what should be our visitor parking stalls for the company’s profit. We long-term lessees can of course rent out our suite for terms of not shorter than six months.
A major feature of Orchard House is the view from suites higher than, say, the sixth floor. The south-side suites look towards nearby towers such as Roberts House condominiums, but from a distance. To the left are views of South Park, then the forest of Beacon Hill Park, and for those on higher floors Oak Bay, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the American San Juan Islands. To the right, south-side suits overlook James Bay, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the American Olympic Peninsula mountains, Esquimalt Harbour and the Sooke Hills. North-side Orchard House suites have picture-postcard views of the Inner Harbour, the historic B.C. legislative buildings, all of downtown Victoria, the Malahat hills and from upper floors one can see north to the Coast Mountains 150 km distant, and to the east Washington State’s Mount Baker, which is 130 km away.
The common areas of Orchard House look tired after 50 years, but lessees paid for major repairs and higher-standard new windows during the years 2010-2018. Completed work includes the double-glazed windows and balcony slider doors, motion-activated bathroom fans, a new roof with railings and anchors for window washers, renewed waterproofing atop the garage, which is overlaid with lawn and sprinklers, some plumbing repairs to the seasonal outdoor pool, a new backup electricity generator, new hallway carpeting and a card-op laundry in what was originally a games room.
All elevator mechanicals are still original and the three elevator cabs have never had exhaust fans, although the vents and electrical receptacles are available, and even though Island Health in 2020 called the company suggesting that fans would be a well-advised improvement during a viral epidemic. The building was passed over by Telus when the company installed internet and TV fiber-optic cable throughout Victoria, perhaps because Westsea couldn’t be bothered arranging for access to the building and its suites. Suite fuse boxes are being replaced with circuit breaker panels over the years, yet most suite bathrooms don’t have a power outlet in the bathroom, even though the panel is on the hall side of that wall, so ‘could easily be done, but don’t ask, as the answer is “no”.
Orchard House amenities include the outdoor swimming pool, available June through August, a dated but sometimes functional hot tub on the basement level (9 am–9 pm), an indoor parking stall for every suite (which can be rented out for revenue to the suite lessee), a locker for almost every suite (although some are accessed by ladder), and a bicycle storage room. Notices are never posted about when or whether amenities are in service, apparently for petty adherence by Westsea’s owners to the fact that the lease does not require them.
There is no visitor parking on-site at Orchard House even though there are 34 more indoor parking stalls (245) than suites (211). The City of Victoria bylaw requiring that 10% of residential building parking be allocated to visitors was authorized by the Province just after the building went up, so owner Westsea Construction was and remains exempt from compliance. Westsea rents out the surplus stalls for revenue and/or leaves stalls unassigned and available informally at the site manager’s discretion.
Orchard House tower is concrete and steel construction. During repairs I’ve seen that walls between suites and between suites and hallways are double-wall systems. While concrete transmits tapping sounds, and some suites have original parquet hardwood that clatters a bit, largely it’s a quiet building internally. I live in an ’07 suite adjacent to the elevators, which can sometimes be heard. The ’08 suites are next to the garbage chute, which can emit some clatter. Across the hall, downtown-facing suites overlook a fire hall where engines announce an emergency a few times each day. These are urban sounds we gladly live with; Victoria’s amenities are at our doorstep.
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OrchardHouseLeaseholder.ca 