Lions Bay adds pricey, coveted residential lot
The Village of Lions Bay, north of West Vancouver, contains only 554 single-family residential lots.
Now, the compact municipality that sits tightly against a mountainside overlooking Howe Sound is hoping to do the somewhat novel thing of adding one more singlefamily lot to its count.
Recently, a portion of an offramp where the Sea to Sky Highway meets Kelvin Grove Way was closed. Lions Bay saw a chance to carve out a triangular-shaped chunk of land for a new home lot.
The municipality is taking this new lot to the Land Title Office for registration and will assign it a new address of 35 Kelvin Grove Way.
It’s also looking to hire a licensed realtor to help it sell the lot for “the highest net value possible.”
Craig Doherty of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, who lives and works in Lions Bay, is applying for the job. He explained why the new lot will be coveted.
“On a macro level, over the course of time, Lions Bay has gone from being about affordability and a hippie place in the late 1960s and ’70s to, I sense, a place heading toward Monterrey or Carmel on the (U.S. West) coast,” he said. “But then, it only has about 550 singlefamily homes.”
Lions Bay council is looking at ways to add subdivisions, coach houses or duplexes, he said.
Last year, a 66,000-square-foot single-family lot was created at Brunswick Beach in Lions Bay and it’s on the market for $2.7 million.
Mayor Karl Buhr said there are plans to create about six new parcels of land through situations such as “excess road allowance” or changes in “right of way.”
There’s no timeline for identifying or creating the new lots, but they might include sites that may have seemed “unbuildable” in the past, but could now be considered for single-family, residential zoning thanks to advances in construction technology, said Buhr.
In the case of the Brunswick Beach lot, Buhr said it had long existed as a vacant plot to provide access to the ocean as drawn in subdivision plans dating back to 1909 and, for some reason, a land title office in Winnipeg.
At that point in time, some of these lots would have been accessible by boat only. Now, it sits in between two houses.
“Someone there described it as an esplanade, which makes you think they had never actually seen it,” since it is quite steep, said Buhr. “It hasn’t sold yet, but it’s a very nice piece of land.”
The motivation for creating new residential lots in Lions Bay and selling them off like this is that the tax base “is too small,” said Buhr. “We can’t tax to meet all of our needs.”
The Kelvin Grove lot will sit right above the highway.
“On the flip side, being so close to the highway, means you can get to it in seconds,” said Doherty, adding he has sold other homes on Kelvin Grove and the location means it’s possible to build for 180-degree views “from Horseshoe Bay right up Howe Sound.”