Food

Property Developer Promises Year of Free Avocado Toast with Every $300K Condo

Right, THAT's what Millennials need in order to buy homes.
avocado toast
Photo: Getty Images

The Kira project is a new, ultra-contemporary condo development in Vancouver, Canada, that is trying to entice Millennials with the vague promise of “modern amenities,” including an on-site meditation room and a rooftop courtyard that will look dope on your dog’s Instagram account. And regardless of whether you drop $399,900 ($297,225 USD) for a one-bedroom unit, or $649,900 ($483,023 USD) for three bedrooms, the developer promises to throw in a year’s worth of avocado toast for free. (Or for somewhere between $399,900 and $649,900, but let’s not crease our foreheads about the details, yeah?)

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Woodbridge Homes has promised that new home-buyers will only have to pay 10 percent of the down payment, compared to the 15 percent to 25 percent that is usually required. And yes, each new Kira resident will also get a gift card to an unnamed local restaurant that would cover the regular purchase of avocado toast—or any other breakfast option—for a full year. “Saving for a down payment does require some saving and sacrificing,” Woodbridge Homes president Jamie Howard told The Star. “At the Kira project, we say you can have your avocado toast and eat it too.”

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time that smashed and smeared avocados have been used to try to convince twentysomethings to buy a place. In May 2017, an Australian real estate agency made the same “Free Avo-Toast For a Year” offer to anyone who bought one of its $600,000 ($422,643 USD) two- or three-bedroom townhomes in the Brisbane ‘burbs. Ray White Sherwood even helpfully included a photo of an extra-looking feta-topped slice of avocado toast in its online listings, because this is A GODDAMN AMENITY. (Yes, this was the “gift card to a local cafe so you can order it yourself” kind of toast, too.)

Although it’s easy to blame Millennials for this (because they’ve been blamed for literally everything else), the free avocado toast deal seems to be more about taking the piss out of Tim Gurner. Two years ago, the controversial Australian real estate developer told 60 Minutes that if young people wanted to have any chance of ever owning a home, they needed to lay off the breakfasts out.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said in the infamous interview. “We're at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high. They want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year. The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it [and] saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder.” (Here’s where we point out that Gurner bought his first property thanks to a $34,000 loan from his granddad.)

As anyone not named Tim Gurner has already figured out, dropping a few bucks on breakfast isn’t the reason why Millennials struggle to save money or invest in real estate; it has far more to do with stagnant wages, a depressing amount of student loan debt, and those ever-increasing—and ever-disproportionate—home prices. The BBC calculated how much avocado toast it would take to make a down payment on a place in several major cities, and it’s staggering. A small place outside the city center in New York costs the equivalent of 12,135 slices of toast, while in San Francisco it would be 15,975 toasts—which adds up to 33 and 44 years’ worth of every-single-day avocado toast, respectively.

So yeah, you better step it up, Woodbridge Homes. One year of toast is nothing.