Plaza Holdings Inc., a publicly listed company in Canada, ventured into construction of a mega shopping mall in Edmonton, which is rated as the largest shopping mall in North America. The company’s board of directors, after much market research, decided that instead of selling the shopping mall to a local investor who had approached them several times with excellent offers that he steadily increased during the year of construction, the company would hold this property for the purposes of capital appreciation and earning rental income from mall tenants. The construction of the mall ended on December 31, 2019. Plaza Holdings retained the services of a real estate company to find and attract many important retailers to rent space in the shopping mall. The shopping mall was fully occupied soon after construction was completed. According to the company’s accounting department, the total construction cost of the shopping mall was $50 million. The company used an independent appraiser to determine the mall’s fair value annually. According to the appraisal, the fair values of the shopping mall at December 31, 2020, and at each subsequent year end were:

2020 ............................. $50 million

2021 ............................. $60 million

2022 ............................ $63 million

2023 ............................ $58 million

The independent appraiser felt that the useful life of the shopping mall was 20 years and its residual value was $10 million.

Instructions

Describe the impact on the company’s income statement and prepare the necessary journal entries for 2021, 2022, and 2023 if it decides to treat the shopping mall as an investment property under IAS 40:

a. Using the fair value model.

b. Using the cost model.

Note that the mall’s rental income and expenses would be the same under both options, and thus can be omitted from the analysis for this exercise.