On the eastern edge of downtown Vancouver, the redevelopment of the former Canada Post site on Georgia Street signals what is being seen as an eastward migration of Vancouver’s commercial real estate.

The Post, by QuadReal Property Group, which completes in 2022 incorporating the old post office into a mammoth mix-use of retail, residential and office towers, has seen U.S. tech giant Amazon take all 1.07 million square feet of office space.

This is more pre-leasing than in the 15 other downtown office towers underway, combined.

East of downtown, the first of nearly a dozen new proposed office projects is complete in Railtown. Across the viaduct into East Vancouver, Strathcona is seeing a development boom, Mount Pleasant is welcoming an explosion in new construction near the new SkyTrain Broadway extension and, in the 450-acre False Creek Flats, developers are staking office sites as the largest medical project in Canada begins construction.

Read the report in the link below:

Vancouver’s commercial real estate action tilts east

Size: 1,498 sq.ft.

Base Rent: $3260/month

Inventories: $80,000

Easy to run, great opportunity for an individual or a family to manage, grow, and expand your own business! Liquor store business since 2017, selling due to family relocation. Prime location, Downtown with many residential houses and commercial buildings nearby.

1498 sq.ft and lots of display isles, and more area for the new owner to add extra isles. Gross rent is $3422.70/month plus utilities. Lots of parking.

Confidentiality Agreement & Buyer Brokerage Contract must be signed before disclosure of further details.

After angry protests over the province’s impending new vaccine passport, the B.C. Restaurant and Foodservices Association is calling on the province to offset costs of added security at bars and restaurants before the program comes into effect on September 13.

Association chief executive Ian Tostenson said Thursday the industry feels it should be compensated for the expected pushback and increased cost.

 “We are doing this, and we are doing it for the benefit of B.C. to motivate people to get vaccinated,” he said. “It seems reasonable to free up some resources to help us do that.”

From September 13, British ­Columbians 12 years and older will need to provide proof of at least one dose of vaccine to enter non-essential businesses and events, including sports competitions, nightclubs, restaurants and movies.

Beginning October 24, only fully vaccinated people will be permitted entry.

Given the protests this week near hospitals and already high tensions over mask rules in ­restaurants, the industry is ­worried the vaccine passport program will result in tense standoffs at the door.

Restaurants call for security backing on vaccine passports

For Sale:                            Pizzarestaurant(Take out ONLY)

Address:                            SW, Calgary

Price:                                  $249,000

Sales                                   $430,000-2020, $537,000-2021

Size:                                    799sq.ft.

Lease Term:                        2 yrs left, 5 yrs renewal option

Gross Rent:                         $3,124/monthincludinggas&electricity

Hours:                                   Mon.– Sun.11am– 9pm

Sales increases year after year. GOOD reviews. Serving SW includingotherCalgary areas due to some special popular menu offered including vegan, dairy free, allergen free. Staff can work on Catering business when orders are not busy during the day. Don’t miss this and hurry before owner changes mind.

Amendments to BC’s Environmental Management Act (EMA) and Contaminated Sites Regulation (CSR) came into force earlier this year and include new requirements for owners and operators of property used for industrial and commercial purposes.

The rules include changes to the process for identifying contaminated sites in BC.

Owners and operators of property used for commercial or industrial use detailed in Schedule 2 (revised) of the Regulation now have additional reporting requirements under the EMA.

B.C. hotels see light at the end of dark COVID-19 tunnel

B.C. consumers often dismiss manufactured homes as a housing option, but the rise of Millennial buyers,  B.C.’s runaway housing prices – and modern new designs – may put Canada’s most affordable homes on buyers’ wish lists this year.

Typical homes in B.C. manufactured home parks often sell for $250,000 or less, a fraction of the cost of detached houses, which average $893,000 across B.C. and $1.8 million in Greater Vancouver.

Some manufactured home park owners are now introducing bright, contemporary designs that are light years removed from a traditional trailer.

The Big Maple manufactured home park, which is located near Davis Bay beach on the Sunshine Coast, for example, has set up and sold 22 Click Homes, a locally-made house design from Click Modular Homes, that average around 1,000 square feet with two bedrooms.

The modern factory-built homes were sold over the past three years, but mostly since 2020, at prices that started at $298,000 and are now in the $334,000 range, according to Big Maple co-owner Ellie Stoscher.

This compares with a benchmark Sunshine Coast detached-house price of $838,900 in May, up 43 per cent from a year earlier, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.

Big Maple buyers also pay a monthly pad rental fee of $500.

Stoscher said she bought adjoining land to house the Click Homes, which are set along their own street in the park. “We are nearly sold out now,” Stoscher said, with just five home sites left and two of those are already claimed.

Big Maple is an age 55-plus community, which, she said, slowed  Click Home demand.

“If we could sell to Millennials, we would have sold all of the homes in five minutes,” Stroscher said.

Individual buyers of manufactured homes on a rental pad usually require 35 per cent of the purchase price as a down payment, but the financing, often through a local credit union, offers similar mortgage rates, terms and insurance as in the traditional housing market.

The big difference in B.C. is the hundreds of thousands dollars less that the mortgage will cost.

Manufactured home parks are also popular with investors, according to Eugen Klein, president of the Klein Group, Vancouver, which specializes in sales of the parks.

In 2020, 28 manufactured home parks were sold in British Columbia. While this was down 10 per cent from a year earlier, the value of sales increased 16 per cent, year-over-year, to $103.1 million, according to the annual B.C. Mobile Home Park Report from the Klein Group.

Klein said manufactured home parks are demanding higher prices this year, which has compressed the capitalization rate, but it still remains an average north of 6 per cent, which is among the highest for any real estate sector.

“In Cariboo, for example, you may get a 6.5 per cent cap rate, which is much better than a 2 per cent cap for a rental apartment building in Kitsilano,” he said

Klein said Vancouver investors are getting the message: over the past two years 60 per cent of buyers of B.C. manufactured parks have come from the Lower Mainland.

“Almost none of the buyers plan to live in the parks,” Klein said, noting that a well-designed park with solid infrastructure is often a low-maintenance, turnkey investment, and are popular with those seeking retirement income.

Multi-family investors find capitalization rates as high as 10 per cent in Northern B.C. towns, but such rates also reflect risk in the boom-and-bust region

------

Northern British Columbia has a become a patchwork of economic islands, with some centres seeing steady performance, others remarkable growth and yet other towns are suffering declining real estate values and high vacancy rates.

But the risk is part of the reason that multi-family investors can find capitalization rates three to four times higher than in Metro Vancouver.

In Fort St. John, the second-largest city in the north and among the centres that should be sharing in the rapidly-emerging liquified natural gas (LNG) industry, the city is nearly alone in B.C. in seeing overall assessed property values decline in the past year, down 2 per cent, according to the B.C. Assessment Authority.

Ron Rodgers, owner/broker of NorthEast BC Realty, said local commercial real estate is characterized by high vacancy rates for both offices and retail with little industrial action being seen.

Rodgers believes it could be six months before the city sees an uplift, starting with the re-opening this year of Louisiana Pacific’s oriented strand board mill, which employs about 190 people, rising LNG prices.

Yet Rodgers recently sold an 18-unit apartment block at $70,000 per door with a cap rate in the 7.5 per cent range, though the city’s rental vacancy rate is double-digits.

In Chetwynd, a small town a 90-minute drive north of Fort St. John, property values are up 8 per cent year-over-year and the rental vacancy rate is near zero. In April, a 30-unit, 30-year-old multi-family rental complex sold in Chetwynd for $6.6 million, nearly twice its assessed value.

“The property had multiple offers and went for an area-high of $110,000 per door,” said Chris Haynes of Oakwyn Realty Ltd. of Vancouver, which brokered the deal. “It had a cap rate of around 10 per cent.”

This compares to annual yields as low as 2 per cent to 3 per cent in Greater Vancouver multi-family properties, where per-door prices can be north of  $400,000.

Key reasons for the Chetwynd property boom is that two LNG pipelines are coming through the town this year - the Coastal Gas Link project and the Enbridge Sprucewood pipeline loop - and very little has been built in the town in a number of years.

“Hotels are full, and campgrounds and RV parks have been full for the past two years with [pipeline] workers, “ said Naomi Larsen, executive director of the Chetwynd Chamber of Commerce.

She added that average townhouse rents are $1,800 and even one-bedroom basement apartments rent for $1,000 a month. But she cautioned that, once the pipelines move on, Chetwynd may slumber.