Western Investor's first annual pick of the top 10 towns for western Canadian real estate investors
When Mayor Dianne Watts opened Surrey's $36 million City Centre library in September, it underscored what may be the smartest town for real estate investing in Western Canada. Just days earlier, Ivanhoe Cambridge had announced a $220 million expansion of its Guildford Town Centre mall.
The 77,000-square-foot library forms a key part of the giant Central City complex in Canada's 12th-largest city, the second biggest in British Columbia. The centre includes a new city hall, a new campus for Simon Fraser University and the Central City shopping mall. Close by is the sprawling new headquarters of the RCMP, the largest joint federal government/private-sector project in the Pacific Region.
The expansion of the Surrey Memorial Hospital, with a satellite campus for the University of BC, part of a $239 million care and surgery centre, is another link in the outstanding infrastructure in the fastest-growing city in B.C.
Surrey attracts 1,000 new residents every month, which convinced giant developer Concord Pacific to launch a five-tower master-planned community of 3,000 homes in the heart of Surrey's once-troubled Whalley area. More new homes were started in Surrey this year than in Vancouver, and Surrey accounts for one-third of all detached housing starts in BC's Lower Mainland. Yet, at an average price of $569,000 for houses and $222,370 for condos, Surrey homes are half the price as in the City of Vancouver.
NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Association based in Vancouver, recently praised Surrey for both its tax incentives and its action against red tape, including its new mobile reporting for building inspections and an "e-business" system that allows developers to check project status, engineering reports and inspections online. These are among the reasons Surrey accounts for half of all the office construction in Metro Vancouver this year and has the region's second-highest inventory of industrial real estate.
This video by Concord Pacific for its Park Place residential development shows how Surrey is developing.
