Developer sells land valued at $175M after issues with North Vancouver
A valuable piece of land in the District of North Vancouver was recently sold because the owner and the District of North Vancouver couldn’t agree on development plans.
Wesbild, a Vancouver-based developer, owned 1371 McKeen Avenue, a 27.5-acre waterfront site with considerable development potential. After eight years of trying to devise a plan with the District of North Vancouver, it decided to put the land up for sale and recently closed that sale.
Daily Hive Urbanized reported on the land in 2019 when the district rejected one of Wesbild’s proposals. Based on a release we received from Wesbild, it sounds like not much has changed since then.
“After eight years of ownership, the 27.5-acre waterfront industrial site in North Vancouver has been sold to a Canadian institutional investor. This property represents one of the last remaining privately-held waterfront sites of magnitude in the area,” Wesbild revealed in a statement to the media.
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Wesbild President and CEO Kevin Layden said, “After several development applications with the District of North Vancouver that did not proceed, we had to pivot and focus on renovating the existing warehouses that provide much-needed industrial and storage space.”
BC Assessment has the land valued at a whopping $175,272,400, and the Metro Vancouver Industrial Group shows that the most recent sale of the land was valued at $120,000,000.
“With industrial vacancy at less than 1% in North Vancouver, and with industrial rents in the range of $25 to $27/square foot, businesses in North Vancouver are challenged by increased costs. Across Metro Vancouver, we need more industrial space. But we need a reset in thinking about industrial land development in Metro Vancouver if we are to
compete on the world stage,” he added.
Back in 2019, when the subdivision proposal was rejected, Wesbild argued that it would have provided more flexible parcels of land to support a broader range of businesses, especially small to mid-size industrial companies. The resulting subdivided parcels would have been between 0.6 acres and 10.8 acres in size, which would have helped to address some of the industrial space shortage on the North Shore.
Subdivision proposal for 1371 McKeen Avenue, North Vancouver District. (Wesbild)
Tony Quattrin, vice chairman of the National Investment Team at CBRE Vancouver, sounded optimistic about the transaction.
“We view this as a landmark transaction that represents a significant sale in an emerging asset class: industrial outdoor storage (IOS). There’s a number of large institutional investors around the globe showing interest in IOS,” he said.
“We are delighted with the sale as it brought in a well-known Canadian institutional investor. With the limited amount of industrial land in Metro Vancouver, the investor here took a long-term view that it was a good investment for reasonably priced land supported by a strong holding income,” Quattrin added.
We have requested a comment from the District of North Vancouver regarding the sale and some of the claims made by Wesbild.
With files from Kenneth Chan