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With the real estate market across Canada still booming, a race is on to provide luxury accommodation for the wealthy in super-tall buildings.

The top-end investment of the moment is combined hotel and condominium skyscrapers for five-star clients who want all the comforts of home, whether they own the place or are renting a room for the night.

In Toronto five hotel-condo projects are under way, two of which are competing for the status of being the tallest building in the country.

A similar project is in progress in Vancouver, and developers are considering projects for Calgary and Montreal.

The immediate attention is on Toronto, where United States entrepreneur Donald Trump is committed to building a 70-storey, US$500 million  hotel-condo. That will be competing with two projects of Toronto developer Harry Stinson, all of them within five minutes' walk of each other.

Mr Stinson's selling point is a kind of downmarket luxury with a touch of humble nationalism.

'I admire Donald's marketing expertise, but this ain't New York. Canadians are cheap.'

Mr Trump's most expensive condos are selling for US$11.3 million while Mr Stinson's condos of the same size are selling for US$5.6 million.

Mr Stinson, who is already building a smaller 51-storey hotel-condo project in the same area, is planning to spend only US$300 million on his proposed 81-storey Sapphire Tower. But he is promising that it will be significantly higher than Mr Trump's more expensive tower.

The boom in hotel-condo development, if that is what it proves to be, is based on complementary economics - each has something for the other.

The harsh economic reality  is that nobody can afford to build a five-star hotel by itself. Similarly, you cannot afford just to build a luxury condo with all the amenities its owners would like.

So projects are planned to provide the kind of luxuries expected of five-star hotels immediately becoming selling points for condos in the same building - top-drawer restaurants, room service and bars. At the same time, advance sales of condos subsidise the cost of building five-star hotels.

One developer estimates that a luxury condo in Toronto can bring almost twice the price if it is linked with the name and the amenities of a five-star hotel.

The developer of the new Shangri-La Hotel and Residence in Vancouver told a Toronto newspaper:  'We just couldn't afford to build either [a hotel or residence] with this level of service. There are major benefits by putting both in a single tower. In a way they feed off each other.'



Trump seeks share in Toronto's new luxury hotel-condo market