With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1406705
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 37 With a push from COVID, the B.C. property market is reinventing itself. We explore this transformation through four themes: why industrial real estate keeps booming, where British Columbians will work post-pandemic, how that event changed housing patterns, and what First Nations' rise as developers means for them and for the province's shelter shortage Lori Fell got a job a year ago as a human resources assistant at a major grocery and housewares store. The good, steady-paying work was a satisfying reward for having gone back to school in her 40s after being laid off from the telephone company. It turned out that re-educating herself and finding work wasn't the biggest chal- lenge Fell would face. For a year after she was hired, she wasn't able to find a place to rent. So she lived in a 4.5-metre trailer that she towed to the area with her 2002 Mazda, in the only spot she was able to find—a prop- erty 35 kilometres out of town. She had elec- tricity but no water, so she had to haul that out in giant plastic bottles. Fell isn't a minimum-wage worker living on the fringes of Metro Vancouver or Vic- toria, forced there by the upward spiral of housing costs. She makes reasonable money at the Four Rivers Co-op that is a pillar of her community. And the place she was try- ing to find a home is Vanderhoof, a town of about 4,500 people an hour west of Prince George. Not where you expect the housing crunch to be. But it is. "I'd really like to stay. I love the commu- nity. But I am feeling defeated at this point," Fell said this past summer, after months of struggling to compete because she has two dogs, her only companions. That earns her an automatic off-the-island vote from many potential landlords. She found a trailer court at one point that was pet-friendly. But the owner got 50 applications, and she didn't win that lottery. Fell's experience is just one of the many real estate stories in this province that are unfolding as patterns of living and working —the forces that ultimately drive property markets—continue to mutate under the pressure of long-term trends and short-term shocks, like the pandemic. R E A L E S TAT E R E P O R T 2 0 2 1