Asian investment
Mum was still the word last week, but Lake Okanagan Resort near Kelowna was set to become public knowledge May 1 in the latest purchase of B.C. real estate by Chinese investors.
The 217-room property was listed last summer with Mark Lester and Alan Johnson, who now head the specialized assets group of JLL.
“Somebody who’s a good operator and is going to be hands-on – there’s a tremendous opportunity there,” Lester said last summer, noting: “There’s considerably more investment that could take place.”
The property includes a 158-slip marina and the only licensed beach on Lake Okanagan, as well as a nine-hole golf course and 15 acres of development lands.
And while Lester’s lips remain sealed till May 1, he remarked at an Urban Land Institute (ULI)seminar earlier this spring that an investment group from China had gone firm on a property that he trusted this columnist to identify.
“This is a resort in the Interior that five years ago we would not have imagined would have been part of the investment profile of mainland Chinese,” he told the ULI. “It’s a tourism investment club that wants to be able to have a destination to bring people.”
The group became interested in the property last year when the province and Central Okanagan Economic Development Commission introduced Chinese investors to opportunities in the Okanagan. Lester said the visit generated “very serious interest.”
The deal parallels what China’s Suzhou Youth Travel Services Co. Ltd. is planning through its subsidiary, SSS Manhao International Tourism Group in Nanaimo.
SSS Manhao has received approval for a 240-room hotel in downtown Nanaimo tagged at $50 million that would be integrated with Suzhou’s tour offerings.
The past year also saw the purchase of Harrison Hot Springs Resort and Spa near Chilliwack and Brentwood Bay Resort and Spa near Victoria by investors backed by mainland Chinese cash.
Northern exposure
April 30, 1991: “a nice, scenic drive” (according to my journal) brought me to Atlin, B.C., a place hemmed in by mountains with structures that seemed unchanged since the Klondike gold rush.
Now, Maria Heissig, owner of Lake Atlin Resort Ltd., wants others to experience the pristine wilderness of a region that boasts the cleanest air in Canada.
Heissig is seeking investors in Lake Atlin Waterfront Place, which comprises 12 private waterfront lots and two lakefront commercial lots just six kilometres outside of town. Since the project’s launch last year, two lots have sold.
Heissig said interest in the project has come from the Yukon, B.C. and Alberta as well as the U.S., Europe and Russia.
“Germany, France and Austria are experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures this year,” she said, noting this has prompted people who depend on ski hills to look abroad.
“Some businesses are beginning to look for opportunities elsewhere, especially in northern Canada.”
But, having been there – and to quote Klondike balladeer Robert W. Service, “gazed on naked grandeur / Where there’s nothing else to gaze on” – the area’s isolation is as much a hurdle as a lure.
The sole road access to this part of B.C. is from the Yukon, though the Whitehorse airport is a mere 90 minutes away.
Given that land prices are competitive with Whitehorse, at $225,000 an acre and up (quarter-acre lots in booming Whitehorse sell for $200,000), Heissig is optimistic that investors will see Atlin’s value and step in.
Strong year
The value of B.C. farm properties posted a strong increase in 2013, rising 3% in Farm Credit Canada’s survey of farmland values.
The survey of benchmark properties across the province is now an annual publication, and the latest edition indicates the upswing in values in 2013 was the greatest since 2008.
Driving the increase was heightened activity in the Peace River region, where good grain prices in 2012 and wealth from the resource sector drove competition, and in turn prices, for rural properties.
Notably, activity in the Bulkley Valley contributed to the increase in values, too.
When the province included 160,646 acres of land in the Agricultural Land Reserve in the Fraser-Fort George and Bulkley-Nechako regions in 2000 and 2002, skeptics billed the move a ploy to boost the size of the reserve at the expense of extractions of better land elsewhere.
Now, it seems, demand in the region is increasing.
