Chinese Investors Scoop Up Vancouver and Toronto Office Towers, As More Eye Commercial Market

Another real estate transaction in Vancouver involving Chinese buyers has people talking, but this time the eye-catching number is for a commercial property.

A small office tower — the 212,000 square foot United Kingdom building, which might best be described as a B class structure — in the heart of downtown Vancouver sold for $122 million on Monday. The deal has yet to close, so details remain scarce other than that the buyer of 409 Granville St. was from mainland China.

“It sold for more (than) $600 a square foot,” said one source, who said that might be 50 per cent more than the going rate for similar office buildings in the area. “When I heard the number, I thought ‘no way.’ But the thing is it’s right on top of a SkyTrain station. I think the Chinese are buying the land for speculation as much as the building.”

Quietly, Chinese investment in the Canadian commercial market is heating up. Reuters reported in August that Anbang Insurance Group Co. Ltd., a Beijing-based company with a reported $114 billion in assets, which made a splash in New York’s property market last year by buying the famed Waldorf Astoria for US$1.9 billion, purchased a land lease that gives it control of the HSBC building in Toronto’s financial district.

Like the residential world, tracking of Chinese commercial real estate investment can be difficult because deals can be done through numbered company and investors represented by a Canadian law firm.

Reference: Business Financial Post

http://business.financialpost.com/…/chinese-investors-scoop…