Mar
Canada’s Top Areas For Pre-Construction Buying: The Okanagan, Kootenays, and Vancouver Island
by Heather McDowell
While the rest of the nation is holding its breath waiting to see how pre-construction unfolds in its major urban centres like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax, we ask our Canadian Real Estate Wealth readers this important question: do they want to follow the crowd or stand out from it? If it’s the latter over the former, then perhaps a better strategy is for us to turn our collective minds to secondary Canadian markets.
We enlisted the assistance of highly knowledgeable Sylvia McNamee, Director of Ace Capital with Ace Project Marketing Group, one of Western Canada’s fastest-growing real estate sales and marketing firms. Through Ace Capital, Ms. McNamee is dedicated to building community by facilitating investment into funding residential developments while making housing more accessible.
When we asked Sylvia if it was strategically advantageous for investors to focus on primary urban markets or secondary ones, she shared her thoughts:
We’re not focused on urban centres, but on secondary markets like Kelowna and the Kootenays, and on southern Vancouver Island in commuter areas like Langford, Colwood, and Sannichton. These areas have shown the ability to ‘bubble’ from large fluctuations in the real estate market because of the high demand from buyers that are priced out from urban centres, even as we see prices continue to drop in major cities. Because we focus on pre-sale developments, buyers can purchase a property in a location they want now but without the need to lock into a mortgage until the property is constructed and ready to deliver (usually 18 to 24 months), which allows plenty of time for interest rates to go down as projected by Bank of Canada.