Home builders grab Vancouver land

January 6, 2018

If a housing bubble is building in Metro Vancouver, residential developers apparently haven’t heard the news.
A recent Altus Group survey of large commercial real estate transactions (priced at $1 million or more) showed that investors purchased more residential land in the region than any other type of real estate in the third quarter of 2017.
In the three-month period, developers and investors bought $1.85 billion worth of land for residential projects, representing 53 per cent of total major real estate transactions in the quarter.
And prices are soaring. In one case cited by Altus, a condo developer paid the equivalent of $16 million per acre for a 2.1-acre site in suburban Coquitlam. It is now common for Metro Vancouver land prices to top $700 per square foot buildable (the price of the land plus the amount of square feet that can be built on it).
The B.C. Real Estate Association is among the groups forecasting a decline in Metro Vancouver housing sales, but not in prices, in 2018.