Yes. Absolutely.
I'd like to offer the committee the way in which I saw the evolution and the timeline of this project.
When I got in the job in 2022, we were coming out of the pandemic. Coming out of the pandemic, the real property world was very affected in two ways. There was a large delay in some of the projects, because during the three years of the pandemic, many projects didn't move forward. There was also a sharp increase in everything that we were trying to do, because of the inflation in many jurisdictions. Remember, we are in 112 different countries. Prices were going up. We basically wanted to accelerate some of the work we wanted to do. We looked at process. We looked at governance. We wanted it to be agile. We wanted to able to catch up a little bit on the backlog and to be able to avoid further increases in costs as we moved forward in time.
The New York residence was exactly one of those properties. We had a project since 2021. We were not able to deliver this project during the pandemic. There were delays in getting the permits. In 2022, toward the end of the year, we were questioning ourselves and looking now at the increasing costs for that project. It all started at close to $1.5 million. Then it was $1.8 million. Now we were looking at $2.6 million.
We went back to the drawing board in 2023. As part of the governance, we accepted to review options. Then we started investigating what the market could offer. That's exactly where we found that the market in New York could offer an option that would not only meet all our requirements but also bring down the cost. That's when we started zooming in on that option very quickly.
My timeline that I'm following is that in 2021, we could not deliver. That dragged into 2022. Then we changed, we pivoted, and finally found a solution. We have resolved the issue of the official residence in New York and we have saved millions of dollars on it.