The City of Surrey is now leading the way in new single-family detached home construction in the Lower Mainland, according to BC Assessment data released last week.
There were approximately 83,600 new homes built in Surrey in 2015 compared with Vancouver’s roughly 81,000.
Surrey also surpassed Vancouver in all types of new properties being built, including strata, single-family detached homes and commercial/industrial properties.
The only municipality to outpace Surrey in terms of overall new property growth was Burnaby.
Brian Smith, BC Assessment’s deputy assessor for the Fraser Valley region, said four municipalities are leading the charge when it comes to breaking ground on new property: Richmond, Surrey, Vancouver and Burnaby.
“Those four cities have seen the most in the past few years, with Surrey leading the way over the past five years in folio growth for all property types,” Smith said. “It’s a growing community; there has been around $10 billion worth of new construction [in Surrey] in the past five years. And the market for single-family homes keeps going up steadily, some pockets even more aggressively in their percentage increases.”
Smith said affordability is the main market driver.
“Surrey is definitely becoming the alternative for those people who still want to own that single-family dwelling. We’re finding properties on the west side of the Fraser River are becoming increasingly more unaffordable, with many neighbourhoods having an average sale price at that million-dollar mark.”
Tony Pontaletta, a realtor who runs Pontaletta Group through Re/Max Treeland Realty with his brother Vince, said the Surrey area is seeing a lot of new development in all categories.
“It’s definitely a hotbed,” Pontaletta said. “There are a number of different factors. With the dollar we’re getting a lot of buyers now from the [United] States. We’re getting buyers from Calgary because of the economy – the ones that have been able to get out of their houses. So we’re getting people from everywhere and there just doesn’t seem to be a variable working against us.”
But many real estate agents in the Fraser Valley have concerns about the rapid growth.
Rick Dubord, a Cloverdale-based real estate agent who’s been working in the area since 1973, said in a March 2015 interview with Business in Vancouver that the City of Surrey is addicted to the tax dollars it reaps from residential development, with little regard for sustainability.
“They’re wanting the population to grow because they’re needing the revenue,” Dubord said. “So are we equipped for it? Certainly not. Not when you consider all the services, no, not at all.”
Pontaletta said most areas in Surrey are growing sustainably, but there are a few pockets where development has gotten out of hand.
“I’m finding in some areas everything’s getting built so fast, there’s not that proper split when it comes to things like school catchments,” he added. “So some of the areas are being built up too fast and people aren’t really stepping aside to think about where they might need an extra school or park to go in as well.”
Part of the reason Surrey is leading the region’s housing markets is that it has a lot of land ripe for development, Smith said. He noted Richmond, where assessment values jumped as high as 20% for 2016 in some areas, doesn’t have the land availability that Surrey does.
