Whistler’s Sundial Hotel offers new way of creating staff housing

Whistler’s Sundial Hotel offers a new way of thinking around much needed staff housing

Sundial Hotel (left) and Pan Pacific Whistler Mountainside (right). (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Thousands of cyclists will take to the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler this weekend for the 15th annual RBC GranFondo Whistler road cycling race.

In recent years, the road cycling race has attracted over 7,000 cyclists, along with thousands of spectators lining the route, especially within Whistler Village, where the finish line is located. Organizers have estimated that the influx of participants and spectators contribute to over $5 million in local economic spinoffs, with much of this produced within Whistler.

Whether it’s the GranFondo, the World Ski & Snowboard Festival, or simply the peak season periods when Whistler’s daytime and overnight populations swell, it takes a sizeable workforce to manage the operations of hotels, services, restaurants, retail, logistics providers, entertainment, Whistler Blackcomb’s mountain operations, and other recreation opportunities.

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According to Tourism Whistler, the resort municipality can accommodate approximately 30,000 overnight visitors, in addition to its residential population of about 14,000. During the winter, Whistler’s workforce expands to over 12,000 full-time equivalent employees, including more than 10,400 in full-time positions and 1,700 in part-time roles.

According to the municipal government’s Whistler Housing Authority, there are currently over 7,300 beds of affordable rental and ownership housing dedicated to people working in Whistler.

As of 2023, the housing authority’s secured purpose-built rental housing wait list reached averages of 3.3 years for a studio unit, 4.7 years for a one-bedroom unit, and 1.6 years for a two-bedroom unit. There were just 25 rental home turnovers in 2023. Furthermore, the average wait time for employee-restricted housing reached 7.9 years in 2023 — up from 3.25 years in 2022, 5.6 years in 2021, 4.8 years in 2020, 4.4 years in 2019, and just 0.4 years in 2013.

Others live in unsecured rental housing, such as investment condominiums and properties, or are forced to commute to Whistler from as far away as Squamish.

Vail Resorts, the owner and operator of Whistler Blackcomb and the single largest employer in Whistler, offers staff the option to live in the resort’s employee housing. Three apartment-style complexes, with shared room configurations, can accommodate over 1,200 staff members.

Similarly, smaller employers also strive to provide secured, affordable rental housing for their staff to better ensure optimal business operations.

One of the most prominently located hotels in Whistler Village is the Sundial Hotel, which is situated at Skiers Plaza — immediately adjacent to the two gondolas and one chairlift that serve as the primary gateways on and off Whistler Blackcomb’s slopes.

The Sundial Hotel features 49 suites and employs between 50 and 60 staff members, fluctuating throughout the year depending on seasonal demand.

More than 50% of the Sundial Hotel’s workforce resides in employee housing, a crucial strategy by Concord Pacific Management for attracting and retaining top talent. By providing both employment and accommodation, the hotel not only secures job stability but also fosters high levels of guest satisfaction.

“It’s a safe and practical model given the immediacy of the housing challenges in Whistler. It’s also a more sustainable option for our employees than making daily trips from Squamish and Pemberton,” Ryan Cooling, the General Manager of Sundial Hotel, told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“I feel our employees are happy and less stressed as result of this housing opportunity. It leads to a positive work environment and in return, a positive hotel experience overall. The Sundial team feels fortunate to be able to provide this opportunity to employees. Hopefully, it reduces some of the strain on Whistler’s employee housing situation.”

The management’s employee housing strategy for Sundial Hotel involves owning and operating houses that have a combined total capacity of over 30 beds. Staff pay affordable rent to live in these houses, and one house even operates at a financial loss for the benefit of the workers.

Ideally, they would like to add more beds into the houses, particularly for the house that is closest to the Sundial Hotel, but the move faces regulatory hurdles from the municipal government.

When some of their employee housing beds are not used for Sundial Hotel staff, they have been offered up to other local businesses, such as Black Tie Ski Rentals.

“Houses are well maintained, staff are looked after, this along with having somewhere that is subsidized and stable to live in Whistler is a rarity. Many people I know here are having to move every few months or have unpredictable rent increases,” said a Sundial Hotel manager who has been residing in employee housing for the past year and a half, in an email to Daily Hive Urbanized.

A housekeeping supervisor living in employee housing over the past year also said, “Before coming out to Canada I struggled to secure private housing and almost gave up on coming to Whistler all together. This was the same for many of my friends, and even if they had found housing, it would only be on a temporary basis, having to move accommodation monthly.”

This is a relatively recent strategy for the Sundial Hotel; its first house for employee housing was purchased only about four years ago. This move roughly coincided with a surge in waitlists for the Whistler Housing Authority’s employee-restricted rental housing program, which reached unprecedented lengths at that time, and the rise in popularity of short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb.

While short-term rental platforms have increased and optimized Whistler’s overall overnight visitor capacity, helping to offset stagnant hotel capacity growth, this has further reduced housing availability for the local workforce. Even in 2019, according to one account, nearly one-in-five homes in Whistler were listed on Airbnb. As a resort municipality, Whistler is also largely exempt from the most restrictive new regulations on short-term rentals by the provincial government.

Some other hotels in Whistler have gone as far as setting aside on-property hotel rooms to provide much-needed staff housing, but this is detrimental to Whistler’s visitor capacity and the long-term financial viability of the business. But for the time being, the benefits of setting aside hotel rooms for staff to live in on at least a semi-permanent basis exceeds the high opportunity costs of such a move.

Early in the post-pandemic recovery period, some businesses in Whistler had to reduce their operating hours due to a shortage of seasonal labor, which was particularly exacerbated by the lack of available housing. There are challenges with maintaining the status quo of business operations, never mind the required labour capacity for businesses to innovate and expand.

There is no shortage of job listings in Whistler, which is indicative of the continued immense housing shortage in the community.

Earlier this summer, construction began on a new four-storey building in Cheakamus Crossing near Whistler Olympic Village to provide 104 new additional units of employee-restricted rental housing, which will be owned and operated by Whistler Housing Authority. This is made possible by the provincial government’s financial support of $12.7 million in non-repayable grant funding and $27 million in low-interest repayable construction financing.

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