GEORGE WONG, 49, has a special reason to look from his 18th-floor office window in West Hastings Street's Guinness Tower and watch the One Harbour Green project rising two blocks away. And it's not just because the Macdonald Realty Realtor of the Year and his 25-member Platinum Project Marketing Group sold out the 57-unit development in a little over a month.

In October, the Hong Kong-born, Vancouver-raised Wong will actually move into the building, where his third-floor, 2,200-square-foot unit (plus 3,000-square-foot deck) set him back "a lot less" than the penthouse. That's the one for which Wong got a record $6.02 million from a Texan couple, for whom it will be a "recreational" -- and fourth -- home away from home.

Wong won't have to move his furniture and clothes quite so far. He lives 13 floors higher in the nearby Anila, which is the first in ASPAC Developments' alphabet of Coal Harbour projects -- Anila, Bahania, Casina, Denia, Escala -- which only changed sequence with One Harbour Green.

The new naming rule will hold for at least one more development, the 71-unit, $180-million Two Harbour Green. Its 5,800-square-foot penthouse and 3,000-square-foot "sky garden" will fetch "over $8 million -- closer to 10" when sales begin in April, Wong said.

That project will easily take Wong past a career sales total of $1 billion -- still small spuds beside ASPAC brother-principals Raymond, Thomas and Walter Kwok's reported joint net worth of $13.7 billion.

As for the size and cost of the gestating Three Harbour Green, "That depends on what we get from buyers at Number Two," Wong said. But he does expect them to maintain their current composition of 60 per-cent local, 20 per-cent American and the remainder from Britain, Germany and elsewhere.

"Very few Asian are buying here now," he said. "And those that do are already local residents."

Some may also be brushing up on their meditation, which Wong began as a University of B.C. commerce and accounting student and now practises twice daily.

He gets more than psychic and academic rewards from the Point Grey campus nowadays. He sold out Orca West's 95-unit Galleria project there in one week last month, but expects to take three months moving Brenmor's upscale, low-rise Esse, where Latin scholars may clamour for unit 2B.

Looking into his five-year crystal ball, Wong sees "a lot more world travellers coming here to buy for recreational purposes in Victoria, Kelowna and Vernon." Meanwhile, Vancouver working couples "are setting aside their capital for weekend getaways in place like Agassiz," where, coincidentally, he represents a property near the Sandpiper golf course.

As for Wong in 2010, "I want to spend two months a year in Bali, two in the Caribbean, six in Vancouver, and the rest I'll fill in -- maybe Tibet.

"I told you I've started meditation again."

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RICHARD SAXTON of the local biz clan -- father Andrew has been a player since the 1950s, brother Andrew Jr. is a global banker and sometime putative politician -- pumps out many business stories himself.

He airs business reports twice hourly on L.A.'s KFWB 980 all-news station. Saxton also gets 2 million listeners via the Bloomberg Radio Network, Sirius & XM Satellite Radio, WBBR in New York and the Bloomberg Terminal. You may have heard him deliver the Bloomberg Report on CKNW here Tuesday.

But repeated rain has made Southern Californian golfing less promising for Saxton lately. And not only him. Canadian Mike Weir triple-bogeyed on the Riviera Country Club's 13th hole Friday while trying for a third win in the Nissan Open.

As both dodged the deluge, Saxton says the former Masters Champion told him he expects to play in September's Canadian Open on our Shaughnessy course, where Saxton still squeezes in eight more or less dry games yearly.

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JOHN ROCHARD saved plenty of situations as a goaltender for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer reserve team. He did the same again for Britain's Bradford City reserves, where he says native-born players always had their cleats ready to punish Canadian intruders like him.

Now he's looking to get into a very big game -- the $8.5 billion worth of funds he says are raised annually in North America's youth market.

Yes, he's talking about efforts like your child, sibling or family friend going door-to-door to scrape up dough for a school project or to be backed in a dollars-per-kilometre charity run, etc.

The present system is wasteful of time and energy, and can be uncomfortable or even hazardous for the youthful solicitors, Rochard said. As well, up to 80 per-cent of it may actually be done by the kids' parents, and lack of follow-through means collected sums can be as low as 60 per-cent of those pledged.

Enter Clickathon -- www.clickathon.com -- a web-based system B.C. Institute of Technology instructor and start-up business consultant Fred Mandl developed for Rochard.

The program gives campaigners semi-automated means for soliciting and billing donors. It also reportedly guarantees the latters' data cannot be accessed by any other Clickathon user.

Chairman Dave Richardson, who is a local member of the Winnipeg-based money clan, said the Clickathon's commissions begin at 15 per cent, with most users paying about 10 per cent.

Local licencees are being recruited to serve population areas of around 150,000. The firm is also seeking a signature account on which to grow.

As well as safeguarding youthful campaigners, Clickathon may be a healthier line of work for Rochard. Diving to save a soccer ball once, he hit a metal goalpost head-first and was dizzy for days.

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JOE SEGAL, the Kingswood Capital boss, missed his usual Four Seasons hotel lunch Wednesday. Instead, he was at the Floata seafood restaurant, where Chinatown Rotary Club members saw him receive the Phil Harris award.

That trophy commemorates the chap who founded Rotary exactly 100 years earlier in Chicago, Illinois.

The service club has grown enormously since. Growing too, it seems, is the capital budget for Simon Fraser University's Segal Graduate School of Business.

Segal got the ball rolling with $7.5 million, including the donation of a former Bank of Montreal building at Granville and Pender Street. But a $17-million campaign grew to a realized $25 million this year. But many figured $30 million would be more appropriate, while university-relations VP Warren Gill said $40 million would be better. Campaign director Marg Vandenberg, who was seconded to the task from the varsity's business faculty, figures it could easily go to $50 million.

"It depends how long they leave me on the project," she said cheerily.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005