Canmore, Alberta
Canmore holds $13.4 billion of assessed value on 17,341 permanent residents — more than Medicine Hat with a quarter of the population — because a national park on one side and provincial Crown land on the other cap the supply of private land, and most of what is left belongs to one company that bought 2,887 acres of it in 1989.
8 buildings · 8 with an owner established · 13 sources · 2 tier B · 6 tier A · prepared 2026-10-03
Ownership here is bought one title at a time, like everywhere in Alberta: SPIN2's public catalogue prices a Current Certificate of Title at $10.00 and says an online view costs the same as a download, while its volume products carry no owner name at all. Canmore adds a layer the rest of Alberta does not: the Town does not assess its own property, it "contracts Legassy Municipal Services to provide all property assessment services in Canmore", and it publishes no parcel or assessment dataset — so there is no open value side here either, only the province's municipal-level equalized assessment. Where Canmore's title register does carry something unusual is underground. A century of coal mining under what is now Three Sisters Mountain Village ended in 1979; development is governed by the Canmore Undermining Review Regulation (AR 34/2020), and the developer states that "All information about potential undermining assessments and mitigation completed is fully disclosed to all property owners via covenants registered on title." The binding constraint on ownership, though, is not the register at all — it is that the land beyond the town boundary is not for sale. Banff National Park, "more than 6,000 square kilometres of mountain wilderness", sits to the west under Parks Canada, and the slopes above town are provincial Crown land: on 17 September 2026 the Government of Alberta designated the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area, and the Town stated that it "is not the decision maker for the proposed gondola within the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area. The designation of the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area is a provincial decision."
- alta.registries.gov.ab.ca — “"The user agrees to the terms and conditions set out in the Copyright and Disclaimer statement." The product catalogue restricts the owner-name field to "Registry Agents, Internal LTO and Government Staff, SPIN 2 System Administrators and Municipalities - No Others."”
The marquee buildings
The towers that set the tone of the core, and who holds them. A price is the price a document states, on the date it states — not an estimate of what the building is worth now.
| Building | Use | Owner | Owner type | Last price paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Three Sisters Mountain Village Three Sisters Parkway, Canmore |
Land | Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. more than 1,500 acres of privately owned land set aside as wildlife corridor The largest private landholding in Canmore, and the only one whose scale a public record states. Alberta's Land and Property Rights Tribunal, in 2022 ABLPRT 673, records that "In September 1989, Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. (TSGR) acquired title to approximately 1,169 ha (2,887 acres) of land in the Municipal District of Bighorn No. 8, on the south side of Hwy 1", with plans then for four golf courses, six hotel complexes and over 6,200 housing units. The Town annexed 5,390 ha in 1991 to accommodate it. TSMV's own site names three neighbourhoods and states that "more than 1,500 acres of privately owned land have been set aside" as wildlife corridor. |
Private company | —B |
| Three Sisters Village Area Structure Plan lands Three Sisters Village, Canmore 169 hectares (417 acres) |
Land | Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. The Tribunal decision states "The overall ASP area comprises approximately 169 hectares (417 acres)" and that the site is identified in the Town's Municipal Development Plan as "Resort Centre" and private recreation. TSMV describes it as the resort village centre, "the vibrant, walkable core", with the first residential phase launched in 2025. One company's area structure plan for a single village is almost 2% of the entire area the Town annexed in 1991. |
Private company | —A |
| Silvertip Resort 2000 Silvertip Trail, Canmore |
Mixed use | Stone Creek Resorts Inc. Stone Creek Resorts' own site lists two resorts — Silvertip at 2000 Silvertip Trail, Canmore, and Eagle Ranch in Invermere, BC — and leads with "The Government of Alberta has designated Mount Lady MacDonald as an All-Season Resort Area. The designation marks an important step in advancing planning for the proposed Silvertip Gondola." Silvertip's own pages advertise "Mountain Tranquility", "One of the last opportunities to secure raw land in the Bow Valley", and Cadence Pond, "Seventy luxury condominiums beside the sixth hole". The gondola land is not Silvertip's: it is Crown land the province has designated. |
Private company | —A |
| Spring Creek Mountain Village Spring Creek Drive, Canmore |
Residential | Spring Creek Real Estate Fifteen named lodges and neighbourhoods inside the town core on the developer's own site: Red Fox Lodge, Grey Wolf Lodge, Mountain Lynx Lodge & Chalets, Black Swift Lodge, Timberstone Mountain Lodge, The Arnica Lodge, The Tamarack, +65 Origin Building, Jack Pine Lodge, White Spruce Lodge, Creekstone Mountain Lodge, Creekside Villas, Moraine Ridge Lodge, Glacier Rock Lodge and Rundle Cliffs Lodge, plus commercial space, a property owners' association and the Opera House. Listings on its own site run from $775,000 for an 885 sq ft one-bedroom to above $1 million. It is the densest private holding in downtown Canmore and the counterpoint to TSMV's greenfield position on the valley's south side. |
Private company | —A |
| Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area Mount Lady MacDonald, above Canmore |
Land | Government of Alberta On 17 September 2026 the Town reported that "the Government of Alberta (GoA) announced that they have designated the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area to establish a clear regulatory pathway through which a future application for the proposed Silvertip Gondola can be reviewed", and that "The designation does not approve the gondola, construction, or development". The Town stated it "is not the decision maker". Alberta's all-season resorts programme exists to "more than double our visitor economy in Alberta to 25 billion dollars by 2035" by attracting private capital. This is the defining fact about Canmore property: the land that would expand the resort is the province's. |
Government | —B |
| Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park 1988 Olympic Way, Canmore |
Institutional | Government of Alberta A provincial park inside the town's recreational hinterland, operated by Alberta Parks, which posts its own advisories and closures for it — a bear warning effective 10 June 2026 and fireguard trail closures from 21 September 2026. The 1988 Olympic cross-country venue is public land, not a resort asset, and together with the surrounding wildland it is why Canmore's private supply is finite. |
Government | —A |
| RCMP Canmore Detachment 101 Elk Run Boulevard 647 m2 |
Institutional | Royal Canadian Mounted Police One of only two Crown-owned federal parcels in the entire town, per the Directory of Federal Real Property: 0.58 ha and 647 m2 at 101 Elk Run Boulevard, plus 0.03 ha of employee housing. The whole federal footprint inside Canmore is four parcels and 0.6 hectares — in a town immediately adjacent to Canada's first national park. |
Government | —A |
| Banff National Park boundary lands west of Canmore |
Land | Parks Canada Agency Parks Canada states that Banff "encompasses more than 6,000 square kilometres of mountain wilderness and is part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site", containing the town of Banff and the village of Lake Louise, and runs its own Banff Realty Services. Canmore sits outside the park gate, which is exactly why it exists in its present form: the park caps development inside it, and the overflow is priced into the 17,341-person town next door. |
Government | —A |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
The single most telling number about Canmore property is a ratio. With no open roll, the province's 2026 equalized assessment is the only consistent measure — and it puts $13,418,852,151 of value on a permanent population of 17,341, or $773,900 a resident. Edmonton is $167,000, Airdrie $213,000, Lethbridge $163,000 and Medicine Hat $165,000. Canmore carries more assessed value than Medicine Hat on a quarter of the population, and 83% of it is residential.
Who owns the town
At this scale the significant owner is rarely a trust or a fund: it is one or two local holding companies, a family in its second or third generation, and often the land around the town rather than the buildings in it.
Canmore is the clearest case in this section of ownership concentrated by geography rather than by capital. The town sits in a valley between Banff National Park — more than 6,000 square kilometres of federal land that cannot be developed — and provincial Crown land on the slopes above, where the province, not the Town, decides what may be built. Inside the boundary, the private land is dominated by one assembly bought in 1989: 1,169 hectares on the valley's south side, of which more than 1,500 acres has since been dedicated to wildlife corridor as a condition of the 1992 approval that made the rest developable. Everything else — the downtown core redevelopment, the resort on the north slope — is one company each. No REIT, pension fund or listed landlord publishes a single Canmore asset.
| Name | Type | Holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. Established from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal's own recital of the chain of title in 2022 ABLPRT 673: Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. took title to approximately 1,169 ha in September 1989 in the MD of Bighorn No. 8, the Town annexed the land in 1991, the NRCB approved the project in 1992 subject to conditions including the provision of wildlife corridors, and the 110 ha golf-course component of one plan was later removed in exchange for 15-20 ha of commercial land and up to 475 additional resort or residential units. Mining under the land ceased in 1979 and the Canmore Undermining Review Regulation (AR 34/2020) governs building over it; TSMV states that over 1,000 homes, businesses and a school have already been built in previously undermined parts of Canmore, that undermining assessments are "fully disclosed to all property owners via covenants registered on title", and that "In the Smith Creek Plan Area, there are no known underground coal operations". |
Private company | 1,169 ha (2,887 acres) acquired 1989; more than 1,500 acres dedicated to wildlife corridorB |
| Government of Alberta The province owns the slopes and the decision. Alberta Parks operates the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and publishes its closures; on 17 September 2026 the province designated the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort Area on Mount Lady MacDonald "to establish a clear regulatory pathway" for a future gondola application, under an all-season resorts framework whose stated purpose is to attract private capital toward doubling Alberta's visitor economy to $25 billion by 2035. The Town confirmed it "is not the decision maker". Alberta Parks' own page for Bow Valley Wildland Provincial Park 404s after a site upgrade, so its area is not stated here. |
Government | Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park, the Bow Valley wildland, and the Lady MacDonald All-Season Resort AreaB |
| Parks Canada Agency Banff National Park, Canada's first, "encompasses more than 6,000 square kilometres of mountain wilderness and is part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks UNESCO World Heritage Site". Parks Canada runs its own Banff Realty Services and controls permits for "photography, living in the park and special events". The park boundary is the single hardest limit on land supply in the Bow Valley, and it is a federal one. |
Government | more than 6,000 square kilometres immediately west of the townA |
| Stone Creek Resorts Inc. The dominant private holding on the north side of the valley, and the applicant behind the proposed Silvertip Gondola onto provincially designated Crown land. Stone Creek's own site states the Mount Lady MacDonald designation and markets its remaining raw land as "One of the last opportunities to secure raw land in the Bow Valley". No acreage figure is published, so none is given. |
Private company | Silvertip Resort at 2000 Silvertip Trail — golf course, dining, and remaining single-family homesitesA |
| Spring Creek Real Estate A privately assembled, privately redeveloped quarter of downtown Canmore, with its own property owners' association and the Opera House. Its own listings run from $775,000 for 885 sq ft upward. The company publishes building names but no total area or unit count, so neither is stated here. |
Private company | 15 named lodges and neighbourhoods plus commercial space in the town coreA |
| Royal Canadian Mounted Police The only land the Government of Canada owns inside the Town of Canmore: the detachment site at 101 Elk Run Boulevard (0.58 ha, 647 m2) and an employee housing site whose address the Directory of Federal Real Property records as "Protected" (0.03 ha, 140 m2). |
Government | 0.61 ha over 2 Crown-owned parcelsA |
Who builds the houses
New-home building in this market: the volume, and the firms behind it. Ownership of a builder matters as much as its volume — a private-equity platform and a family firm behave differently.
Canmore built 481 homes in 2025 — 425 of them apartments, 33 row, 17 single-detached and 6 semi-detached. Eighty-eight per cent apartment, in a mountain resort town, against 244 total starts in 2023 and 321 in 2024. It is also the most expensive construction in Alberta on a per-permit basis: 142 residential permits worth $193,440 thousand, an average of $1.36 million each, nearly ten times Airdrie's. Two private developers account for most of the pipeline and both publish their own project lists; there is no builder league table, and the Town publishes no permit dataset.
| Name | Type | Stated projects and land |
|---|---|---|
| Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. Stewart Creek is "established" and "Now Selling" over more than 65 hectares with the Stewart Creek Golf & Country Club; Three Sisters Village launched its first residential phase in 2025 on a 169 ha ASP area; Smith Creek is "Coming 2028". The company also builds The Gateway, a mixed-use hub off Highway 1 with a grocery store, retail, office space, dining and staff accommodation — staff housing being a specific Canmore problem, since the town's 9,173 dwellings (2023) serve a workforce drawn from a far wider valley. Its May 2026 community update is titled "Progress on Housing at Three Sisters Mountain Village" and frames the work as "supporting housing affordability and community diversity in Canmore". |
Private company | Three neighbourhoods on 1,169 ha (2,887 acres) acquired in 1989A |
| Spring Creek Real Estate Red Fox, Grey Wolf, Mountain Lynx, Black Swift, Timberstone, Arnica, Tamarack, +65 Origin, Jack Pine, White Spruce, Creekstone, Creekside Villas, Moraine Ridge, Glacier Rock and Rundle Cliffs, plus live/work and commercial units, estate homes and lots, and vacation rentals. The +65 Origin building is age-restricted — a developer-built answer to a resort town's missing demographic. Prices on its own site are banded from $350,000 to over $1 million. |
Private company | 15 named lodges and neighbourhoods in the town coreA |
| Stone Creek Resorts Inc. Silvertip's own real-estate pages advertise Cadence Pond — "Seventy luxury condominiums beside the sixth hole" — now selling, and Mountain Tranquility, "A rare enclave of single-family homesites, One of the last opportunities to secure raw land in the Bow Valley at Canmore's most coveted address". The scarcity is the product. |
Private company | 70 condominiums at Cadence Pond, plus single-family homesitesA |
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
Canmore's non-residential assessment is $2.22 billion — 17% of the town — and it is almost entirely resort, hospitality and the retail that serves it. There is no office market to speak of and no institutional landlord: no REIT publishes a Canmore asset, and the federal government's entire commercial presence is a leased post office and a leased 245 m2 office. The commercial owners who can be named are the same three developers who build the housing, plus the province.
| Name | Type | Canmore presence |
|---|---|---|
| Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. TSMV's own commercial pages describe The Gateway, off Highway 1 at the entrance to Three Sisters Mountain Village, as "a mixed-use hub blending convenience with community" with "a grocery store, essential services, retail, office space, dining options, staff accommodations", and Three Sisters Village as the walkable resort core with "cafés, boutique shops, wellness centres, and residences". Its May 2026 news item records Ascent Dental as a Gateway tenant. These are the only named new commercial developments in town. |
Private company | The Gateway mixed-use hub; Three Sisters Village resort centreA |
| Stone Creek Resorts Inc. Stone Creek's own site names Rustica, Stoney's Grill and Silvertip Market as its dining venues, a par-72 Les Furber course, a golf shop, tournaments and event space — a single integrated resort operator. Its second asset, Eagle Ranch Resort with Headwaters Lodge, is in Invermere, British Columbia. |
Private company | Golf course, three restaurants, events and conference space at 2000 Silvertip TrailA |
| Spring Creek Real Estate Spring Creek's own site carries a Commercial section, live/work and commercial listing categories, Opera House rentals and a property owners' association — a privately held mixed-use quarter inside a town centre, which is rare at this scale anywhere in Canada. |
Private company | Commercial and live/work units plus the Opera HouseA |
| Government of Canada (all custodians) The smallest federal footprint of any city in this batch: the Crown-owned RCMP detachment at 101 Elk Run Boulevard (0.58 ha, 647 m2) and 0.03 ha of RCMP employee housing, plus a leased Canmore Post Office at 8th Street and 7 Avenue (351 m2) and a leased PSPC office, "Canmore Gateway Shops Site", at 802 Bow Valley Trail, Lots 17 and 18, Block 14, Plan 911 2599 (245 m2). |
Government | 4 parcels, 0.6 ha, 1,383 m2 of floor areaA |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- Any parcel-level assessment or value in Canmore. The Town contracts assessment out to Legassy Municipal Services and publishes no roll; the ArcGIS Hub open-data site for Canmore returns HTTP 401 to its own search API. Every figure here is either municipal-level from the province or stated by a named private owner.
- The current total acreage Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. holds. The 1,169 ha (2,887 acres) figure is the Tribunal's record of the 1989 acquisition by its predecessor Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc.; land has since been sold, developed and dedicated to wildlife corridor, and no current figure is published.
- The area of Bow Valley Wildland Provincial Park, which surrounds Canmore on three sides. Alberta Parks' page for it returns a 404 body after a website upgrade.
- Silvertip Resort's landholding, and whether the proposed gondola route crosses any private land. Stone Creek Resorts publishes no acreage.
- Who owns Canmore's hotels. The Malcolm, the Basecamp properties, the Grande Rockies and the Bow Valley Trail motel strip carry no ownership statement that we could open, and with no assessment roll there is not even a published value to attach to them.
- How many of Canmore's 9,173 dwellings are tourist homes or short-term visitor accommodation rather than residences. The Town's "Accommodation Types" page is linked from its own navigation but the slug returns 404.
- ARLO's fee schedule, and therefore the price of an Alberta title once SPIN2 retires in December 2026.
- No sale-price dataset exists for Canmore or anywhere in Alberta below a per-parcel title purchase.
Sources
- Property Taxes (assessment contracted to Legassy Municipal Services; tax certificate fees) — Town of Canmore · openA
- SPIN 2 Fee Schedule and Product Catalogue — Service Alberta, Government of Alberta · openA
- Who We Are; Neighbourhoods; Undermining; Wildlife Corridor — Three Sisters Mountain Village · openA
- Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd. v Town of Canmore, 2022 ABLPRT 673 (File P21/CANM/T-003, Decision LPRT2022/MG0673), 16 May 2022 — Land and Property Rights Tribunal, Alberta (served from the Town of Canmore's document library) · openA
- Stone Creek Resorts — resorts, Silvertip All-Season Resort Area designation, and Silvertip real estate — Stone Creek Resorts Inc. · openA
- Spring Creek Real Estate — lodges, commercial and listings — Spring Creek Real Estate · openA
- Government of Alberta All Seasons Resort Announcement, 17 September 2026 — Town of Canmore · openA
- Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park (advisories and closures) — Alberta Parks · openA
- Directory of Federal Real Property, full dataset — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat · openA
- Banff National Park — stewardship and management — Parks Canada · openA
- All-season resorts — Government of Alberta · openA
- Property assessments by municipality (Total Equalized Assessment), 2026, and Housing Starts / Building Permits / Population / Dwelling Units — Alberta Municipal Affairs / Alberta Regional Dashboard · openA
- Tariff of Fees Regulation, AR 120/2000 (Land Titles Act), current as of October 1, 2026 — Alberta King's Printer · openA