What Hopewell Deal Says About Campbell Heights
Hopewell Development’s acquisition of 38 acres in Surrey’s Campbell Heights Business Park represents the biggest deal done there to date. (Mom always said, "it's not bragging if it's true.") Avison Young’s Michael Farrell tells us what a transaction of this magnitude says about the park’s growing regional importance.
The property is currently zoned agricultural; the seller is a private farmer who’s run a poultry operation on the site for years, and lived there, too, says Michael (pictured here), who worked on the sale. The land will need to be rezoned before the deal closes (while it’s currently agricultural, the site is not in the ALR; it's earmarked for industrial use in Surrey’s official community plan). Hopewell plans to do a four-building development, with spaces to accommodate tenants up to 200k SF.
Hopewell liked that it was able to go out and purchase a site of such scale (38 acres) that had excellent geotechnical conditions and, because it's square-shaped, would be easy to work with. “You can build whatever the heck you want here,” Michael says. He notes it would be difficult to assemble another site this size at Campbell Heights; the City of Surrey and federal government own large swathes of 1,900-acre region and the rest is smaller lots between five to 10 acres.
The only other development Hopewell has done in Metro Vancouver, its distribution centre in Richmond (shown above), was “probably the largest spec project ever completed” in the region, Michael notes. So it says something that the company’s next move is to Campbell Heights. “It’s a big vote of confidence."
