Industrial park to open in Burnaby’s Brentwood
Tile companies, lighting outfitters, snack-food businesses and even a craft brewery have all shown interest in setting up shop at a new industrial park in Burnaby’s Brentwood Town Centre.
PC Urban recently started marketing for their latest strata industrial complex. Called IntraUrban Brentwood, the developers plan to build the 100,000-sq.-ft. complex at 5495 Regent St. in the Still Creek area located southeast of the booming town centre.
The single-level business park will include 29 units ranging in size from 2,700 to 13,000 square feet. It’s zoned for light industry.
PC Urban said the project marks their third IntraUrban strata industrial location in Metro Vancouver.
“This Brentwood area of Burnaby is experiencing an exploding population in the next few years with the coming multi-family, mixeduse developments,” said PC Urban principal Brent Sawchyn.
“Brentwood will soon be a huge residential community, much like Metrotown,” he said. “And the amenities and vibrancy will be a huge benefit to the businesses that buy into the strata development.”
He said a lot of small business owners want to get a foothold in the commercial real estate market so they can control their own destiny in the region’s challenging leasing environment.
“We have an affordability crisis for residential housing in our city,” he said in a recent interview. “We also have a crisis in terms of employment generating space because the effective vacancy for industrial space is probably less than one per cent.”
He said Vancouver-based PC Urban has developed a niche in putting up light industrial strata spaces in parts of the city that have squeezed out a lot of workspaces as property values have increased, neighbourhoods have densified and rents have soared.
PC Urban launched the IntraUrban model with IntraUrban Business Park on Laurel Street in south Vancouver. They followed that up with IntraUrban Rivershore on Mitchell Island. They are also working on a similar project on Enterprise Way in Kelowna.
After IntraUrban Brentwood, they are planning a more innovative industrial complex at 1055 Vernon Dr., the former site of Able Auctions near Strathcona Park, Sawchyn said.
“That is our IntraUrban Evolution project, which is our vertical, or stacked, industrial concept,” he said. “We’re just about to submit for a development permit.”
PC Urban bought the Still Creek site about two years ago. Before that, it was used as a cross-docks facility for Loomis couriers, he said. “They had a long, thin warehouse where trucks could go in on either side to drop off their pallets of goods or to pick them up.”
He said it has been out of operation for about three years.
Sawchyn said about 80 to 85 per cent of the buyers of their strata industrial units in the region have been owner-users. “The remaining 15 per cent have been people interested in an investment,” he said.
The four-acre site was valued last year at $9.5 million, according to B.C. Assessment. It sits just to the north of the Trans-Canada Highway and to the southeast of Brentwood Town Centre.
Strata industrial prices in Burnaby have climbed from an average of $206 per square foot in 2008 to $376 this year, according to Avison Young, the listing agency for the project.
PC Urban is asking for a starting rate of $425 per square foot.
Ryan Kerr, a principal with Avison Young, said there have not been any new strata industrial product in the Brentwood area since the late 1990s.
“There is not a very large land supply for product like this,” he said. “A big reason for that is the area north of the railroad tracks are the Brentwood land-use plan, which is obviously being turned into condominium highrises.”
He said industrial displacement near the core of Vancouver has pushed out a lot of elbow grease businesses to the south and to the east.
“This is product that will help groups stay in places like Brentwood,” he said.
He said the registration for the project included about 50 prospective buyers.
“There is a very wide range of occupants, from service commercial companies and contractors,” he said. “You’ve got tile groups and we have snack-food companies. We have bike businesses and we have lighting companies and we have building products.”
He said there was also a prospective crafter brewer among the registrants.
Sawchyn said prices have been rising since they completed their similar project on Laurel Street in Vancouver two years ago. “We’ve probably seen about a 60-per-cent mark-up,” he said.