Nakusp, British Columbia
In a village of 1,589 people the question "who owns the town" has a public answer, and it is not a logging company or a family: the Crown owns almost everything around Nakusp, the largest forest tenure is a 25-year licence held by Interfor over Crown land it does not own, and the village itself owns the hot springs, the arena, the airport, the marina and — through a wholly owned BC corporation — a 12,626-hectare community forest.
7 buildings · 5 with an owner established · 30 sources · 6 tier A · 1 tier B · prepared 2026-09-27
British Columbia's land title register is run by the Land Title and Survey Authority and anyone may search it, but each search is a paid transaction: $11.06 for a search under section 377 of the Land Title Act on the fee schedule current at 1 April 2026. There is no bulk owner product and no price-paid file. What is unusual is the Land Owner Transparency Registry — its filing obligation running from 30 November 2020 and its public search live since 30 April 2021 — which names the individuals behind corporations, trusts and partnerships that own BC land and is free to search — the LTSA fee schedule prices a search of publicly accessible information under section 35 of the Land Owner Transparency Act at NIL. At the scale of a village of 1,589 the binding constraint is not the register's openness but publication: nobody publishes building-level ownership for Nakusp, BC Assessment's own site forbids commercial use of its values, and no municipal open-data portal exists. What the province does publish, and publish well, is tenure — forest licences, community forest agreements and Crown land designations are all open, and around Nakusp that is where the land actually sits.
- bcassessment.ca — “Any commercial use of these data in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, including the use of such data for business, residential address or telephone directory services or any solicitation service is specifically prohibited except with the prior written authority of the owner of the copyright.”
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nakusp Hot Springs, Chalets & Campground Hot Springs Road, Kuskanax Valley, about 15 km from Nakusp |
Hotel | Village of Nakusp The Village's own page states the springs are "community-owned and operated". The Village's 2025 audited financial statements carry Hot Springs as one of only four operating and capital funds and as a reporting segment in its own right: hot springs fees and other revenue of $1,243,964 in 2025 against segment expenses of $1,232,739, a $105,875 segment surplus, and $62,241 of hot spring fees held as deferred revenue at year end. The Village also recognised an asset retirement obligation that increased hot springs tangible capital assets. |
Government | —A |
| Nakusp & District Sports Complex 200 8th Avenue NW |
Mixed use | Village of Nakusp The Village's page describes it as housing the arena, a four-sheet curling rink, indoor squash courts and an auditorium, and says the Village books it under a Facility Rental Agreement; rental rates are set by the Nakusp & Area K Joint Service Commission, made up of the RDCK Area K Director and all members of Village Council. The Village carries debt against it under Bylaw 648 (ice plant upgrades, $100,000, 2014–2034) and Bylaw 740 (arena upgrades, $100,000, 2025–2040). Its own "Sale of Municipal Properties" page names the REC Complex (Arena) as a building it wants used more intensively rather than sold. |
Government | —A |
| Nakusp Airport (CAQ5) 1315 Airport Road |
Land | Village of Nakusp "The Village of Nakusp maintains a registered aerodrome located at 1315 Airport Road." A 2,983 ft (914 m) paved runway 75 ft (23 m) wide at 1,689 ft elevation, no lighting and no fuel, maintained year round; Council adopted the CAQ5 Airport Masterplan at its 26 February 2024 regular meeting. The page states maintenance and operation, not the registered title. |
Government | —A |
| Nakusp Marina Upper Arrow Lake waterfront, Nakusp |
Land | Village of Nakusp The Village lets annual marina slips itself, 1 April to 31 March, at published resident and non-resident rates from $800 to $1,687.50 plus tax per slip, with applications through the Village Office. Its 2025 audited financial statements recognise an asset retirement obligation for "decommissioning its marina", and the 2025 Annual Report records a Council priority to "review all options in regards to the Village Marina development". |
Government | —B |
| 611 Broadway Street (the Kinship Building) 611 Broadway Street |
Mixed use | Village of Nakusp Council resolution R042/26 declined a purchase offer from the Kinship Connection Society for 611 Broadway Street and resolved "THAT the Village retain ownership of the Kinship Building and proceed with a transparent public call for proposals for occupancy in accordance with the Village's Non-Market Leasing Policy, with lease terms not exceeding five years", with the competitive process to start at the end of 2026 ahead of the society's lease expiring in February 2027. |
Government | —A |
| Arrow Lakes Hospital Nakusp, BC V0G 1R0 |
Mixed use | Not established a paid title search would answer it Interior Health's own location page states "The Arrow Lakes Hospital is a Level 1 Community Hospital in the Kootenay Boundary health service area. Located in Nakusp... the hospital offers services including surgical, inpatient and emergency." That establishes the operator, not the registered owner: BC health facility title may sit with the health authority, the province or a legacy hospital society, and settling it needs an $11.06 LTSA title search, which was not bought. No open dataset names the owner of a BC parcel. |
Not established | —A |
| Largest private parcel inside the village — PID 011-473-576 No civic address published; 71.06 ha within the Village of Nakusp boundary, ParcelMap BC parcel class "Subdivision", no plan number |
Land | Not established a paid title search would answer it ParcelMap BC classifies this parcel OWNER_TYPE "Private" and gives its area as 710,610 m2 — 71.06 ha, larger than every other parcel the layer returns inside the village and roughly a tenth of the village's 752 ha of dry land. The layer carries a PID and a geometry and no owner name; that is the design. Establishing who holds it needs a paid title search, and if a corporation, trust or partnership holds it, a free LOTR search would name the interest holders behind it. |
Not established | —A |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
Nakusp's assessment base is published in full, by class, by the province — and it says something the rumours do not. There is no major-industry assessment in the village at all, and no private managed forest land: the entire taxable base is houses, small business and a little light industry. The whole village changes hands about four dozen times a year. Figures are the 2026 assessment roll as published in the Ministry's Schedule 701, the Village's 2025 audited financial statements, and the province's 2025 property transfer tax file.
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.
Ownership around Nakusp is concentrated, but in the Crown, not in a company or a family. The largest single holder is the Province of British Columbia, which owns roughly 96% of the land in the 695 km2 around the village. The largest tenure is Interfor's Tree Farm Licence 23 — an exclusive right to harvest 389,360 hectares of Crown land, and 177 hectares of freehold across the whole licence, none of it near Nakusp. The largest locally controlled holder is the village's own company: Nakusp & Area Community Forest (2013) Inc., 100% owned by the Village of Nakusp, holding a 25-year community forest agreement plus a woodlot licence and about 200 hectares it bought outright. Inside the village the Village of Nakusp itself is the largest identifiable owner. Beyond that, nobody publishes building-level ownership for a village of 1,589, and this record does not guess.
| Name | Type | Holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Province of British Columbia (provincial Crown) Derived from our 120 m grid sample of the province's own Generalized Forest Cover Ownership layer over a 695 km2 box around Nakusp: 95.7% of sample points resolve to a Crown class — tree farm licence Schedule B, Crown tenure reserves, community watershed, community forest Schedule B, wildlife management area, provincial park and unclassified forest management unit — against 4.1% private parcel and 0.2% municipal. Inside the village boundary the Crown and Crown-designated share is still about 48% of the total area, much of it the Upper Arrow Lake foreshore. |
Government | about 96% of 695 km2A |
| Interfor Corporation Tree Farm Licence 23 is a licence over Crown land, not ownership of it. The province's OGL tree farm licence agreement boundary layer gives TFL 23 nine polygons totalling 389,360 ha, effective 1 March 2020. The Schedule A layer — "private land or timber owned by the Tree Farm licence holder" — returns just two polygons totalling 177.0 ha for the whole of TFL 23, category "Crown Grant", and ZERO features anywhere in the Nakusp bounding box. Interfor also holds 14 forest licence and one forestry-licence-to-cut cutting authorities near Nakusp. The licensee name comes from the province's TFL current-view layer, which is licensed Access Only; Interfor's own locations page lists Castlegar and Grand Forks as its nearest BC divisions, so tier B. |
Public company | 389,360 ha of Crown tenure; 177 ha of freeholdB |
| Nakusp & Area Community Forest (2013) Inc. "NACFOR is a BC corporation 100% owned by the Village of Nakusp" whose 25-year replaceable community forest agreement "licenses it to manage a forest land base of 12,626 hectares and harvest an average of 20,000 cubic metres — about 500 truckloads of timber per year". The province's OGL managed licence layer gives its community forest agreement K2S as 9,712.4 ha over two blocks and woodlot licence W0406 as 600.4 ha, both active. It is also a freehold owner: "NACFOR purchased about 200 ha of Glenbank Private Lands in November 2021. In 2023, NACFOR also purchased the neighbouring Woodlot 406 on Mt. Jordan." Incorporated 5 November 2013, BC0984911, active. Managing contractor: Cabin Resource Management. |
Government | 12,626 ha managed; about 200 ha ownedA |
| Village of Nakusp The Village owns the hot springs, chalets and campground, the arena and sports complex, the airport, the marina, the municipal campground, Sandy Beach, the waterfront walkway, the Kinship Building at 611 Broadway Street and the Old Firehall at 90 5th Avenue NW, and it is the sole shareholder of NACFOR — an investment carried at $2,082,440 at 31 December 2025, which paid a $250,000 dividend in the year. Land at cost in Schedule A is $1,331,248 of $23,710,304 total tangible capital assets. Its own page states plainly: "Right now, the Village owns too many properties", and it is selling surplus parcels under section 26 of the Community Charter. |
Government | $1,331,248 of land at cost; about 93 ha of municipal parcelsA |
| Arrowtarian Senior Citizens Society The Village's 2025 Annual Report lists four separate permissive tax exemptions to the Arrowtarian Senior Citizens Society, valued at $3,067, $4,167, $2,547 and $2,042 — $11,823 of the $13,397 total of all permissive exemptions granted in the village that year. A permissive exemption is granted on property the organisation holds, so this is the largest non-government property-holding organisation named in any public Nakusp record examined. |
Institution | 4 exempt propertiesA |
| Nakusp Senior Citizens Branch #71 The remaining permissive tax exemption in the Village's 2025 Annual Report, valued at $1,574. All permissive exemptions together came to $13,397, or 0.95% of the 2025 municipal levy. |
Institution | 1 exempt propertyA |
Where property meets office
Recorded only where a public record states it — a disclosure registry, council minutes, a land-use decision. Stated as fact, with nothing inferred from it.
| Holder | Office | Holding |
|---|---|---|
| Nakusp & Area Community Forest (2013) Inc. | Village of Nakusp Council representative on the NACFOR board — Mayor Tom Zeleznik, with Councillor Mason Hough as alternate (2025) | A 25-year community forest agreement over 12,626 ha, a woodlot licence, and about 200 ha of freehold, in a company wholly owned by the Village The Village's own 2025 Annual Report lists NACFOR among the Mayor's council appointments and as Councillor Hough's alternate appointment; NACFOR's own board page lists the same two as the Village Council Representative and Alternate Director, and states that "Board members are appointed annually by the Nakusp Village Council." The Village is the sole shareholder, receives the dividends — $250,000 in 2025, $2,344,435 to the NACFOR Legacy Fund since 2014 — and its Council appoints the board. Both records are published by the bodies themselves; nothing here suggests any private interest. A |
| Village of Nakusp | Village of Nakusp Council (2022–2026 term) | Surplus municipal land and buildings, disposed of by public notice under section 26 of the Community Charter The Village publishes each disposal. It sold 320 Shakespeare Road (0.25 acre, zoned RU-1, PID 013-133-225) as fee simple land for $152,500, noticed 24 June 2024. It offered a 5.5-acre vacant residential parcel on Highway 6 south of the village boundary within the RDCK (PID 015-965-473) at $250,000, reduced 3 September 2025 and still listed. In March 2026 Council passed resolutions R042/26 and R043/26 declining purchase offers from the Kinship Connection Society for 611 Broadway Street and from the Old Firehall Collective for 90 5th Avenue NW, retaining both buildings and directing competitive calls for occupancy under the Village's Non-Market Leasing Policy. The 2026 municipal tax sale was cancelled. A |
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.
There is no housebuilding industry here to rank. The whole village issued 7 development permits, 1 development variance permit, 1 rezoning, 1 temporary use permit and received 4 subdivision applications in all of 2025, and recorded 46 residential market transactions across the year. The Village holds nil in every development cost charge reserve fund — water, sewer, drainage, roads, parks, police, fire, solid waste, amenity, parkland, density and affordable housing all $0 at 31 December 2024 — which is what a municipality looks like when almost nothing is being built. New homes come from individual owners and local contractors, and Canada publishes no builder-level counts at this scale: CMHC's starts series covers centres of 10,000 and over, which excludes Nakusp entirely. No builder is named in this record because no source names one with a figure.
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
The entire business-and-other assessment class in the village is worth $49.8M on the 2026 roll, and only three commercial transactions completed in 2025. No private commercial landlord is identified in any public record examined. The one landlord that is documented is the municipality itself, which holds and leases two buildings under a Non-Market Leasing Policy and runs the hot springs, chalets and campground as a commercial operation; ownership of the main commercial block on Broadway Street is not published anywhere and would need title searches parcel by parcel.
| Name | Type | Documented holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Village of Nakusp Council resolutions R042/26 and R043/26 (March 2026) retain the Kinship Building at 611 Broadway Street and the Old Firehall at 90 5th Avenue NW and direct public calls for proposals for occupancy with lease terms not exceeding five years under the Village's Non-Market Leasing Policy. The Hot Springs and Chalets segment of the Village's 2025 audited financial statements earned $1,243,964 of fees and other revenue. The Village also lets marina slips and sports complex space at published rates. |
Government | 2 leased buildings + the hot springs operationA |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- A logging company was reported to us as owning a large share of the village. What the public record shows is different in kind: Interfor Corporation holds Tree Farm Licence 23 over 389,360 ha of CROWN land whose boundary reaches the Nakusp area, and the province's own Schedule A layer — the layer that maps land a tree farm licensee actually owns — returns 177.0 ha for the whole of TFL 23 and nothing at all inside the Nakusp bounding box. The 2026 assessment roll records $0 of major-industry and $0 of managed-forest-land value in the village. On the evidence examined, a forest company controls a great deal of land around Nakusp by licence and owns none of the village.
- A local family was reported to us as holding much of the village; no public record examined names them, and this record does not repeat it. What was checked: the 2026 provincial assessment roll by class for the Village of Nakusp, the province's ParcelMap BC parcel layer for the village and its bounding box, the Generalized Forest Cover Ownership layer, the forest tenure harvest-authority and managed-licence layers, the Village's 2025 audited financial statements and Annual Report including its full list of permissive tax exemptions, every published section 26 land disposition notice, and a name search of BC's corporate registry. None of these states that any family or family company holds land in Nakusp. Establishing it would require paid title searches, parcel by parcel, and this record does not assert what it has not seen.
- The registered owner of the largest private parcel inside the village, PID 011-473-576 (71.06 ha), and whether a corporation, trust or partnership holds it — a free LOTR search would name the interest holders behind a reporting body, but LOTR search requires an account, which was not opened here.
- The registered owner of Arrow Lakes Hospital: Interior Health publishes that it operates the hospital, not who holds title.
- Ownership of the Broadway Street commercial block, the village's main retail frontage. No source publishes building-level ownership in Nakusp.
- The 5.73 ha and 1.61 ha parcels inside the village that ParcelMap BC classes OWNER_TYPE "Crown Agency" (PIDs 015-958-230 and 015-958-345, both plan NEP980) — the layer names the class, never the agency.
- Whether the Village's marina and airport are held in fee simple by the Village or occupied under provincial Crown tenure: the Village's pages say it maintains and operates both, and its financial statements carry an asset retirement obligation for decommissioning the marina, but neither states title.
- The gap between NACFOR's stated 12,626 ha "forest land base" and the 9,712.4 ha the province's community forest agreement polygon layer returns for licence K2S. The difference may be the woodlot, the Glenbank freehold, retired blocks or a different definition of land base; no source reconciles them.
- No open dataset names the owner of any BC parcel. ParcelMap BC's public extract is geometry plus PID; the fully attributed variant is licensed to government only; BC Assessment's full roll is "named users" only and its site forbids commercial use of the values.
- BC publishes no price-paid file. Property transfer tax data is monthly counts and aggregate fair market value by municipality, with small counts suppressed as "not releasable" — for the Village of Nakusp the corporate-transaction count was suppressed in 6 of 12 months of 2025.
- LOTR covers only land held through corporations, trusts and partnerships. Land held directly by an individual is out of scope, which in a village of 1,589 is most of it.
Sources
- About Us — Nakusp and Area Community Forest — Nakusp & Area Community Forest (2013) Inc. · openA
- NACFOR — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Village of Nakusp — 2025 Audited Financial Statements (year ended 31 December 2025) — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Village of Nakusp 2025 Annual Report — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Local Government Statistics — Schedule 701, Assessed Values for the year 2026 — BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs · openA
- Forest Tenure Managed Licence (FTEN_MANAGED_LICENCE_POLY_SVW) — community forest agreement K2S and woodlot licence W0406 — BC Ministry of Forests via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- FADM - Tree Farm License Agreement Boundary (TFL) and FADM - Tree Farm License (TFL) Schedule A — BC Ministry of Forests via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- FADM - Tree Farm License Current View (FADM_TFL_ALL_SP) — TFL23 licensee — BC Ministry of Forests via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- Forest Tenure Harvesting Authority Polygons (FTEN_HARVEST_AUTH_POLY_SVW), Nakusp area — BC Ministry of Forests via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- Generalized Forest Cover Ownership (F_OWN) — BC Ministry of Forests, Forest Analysis and Inventory Branch, via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS and BC Data Catalogue · openA
- Fees — LTSA Customer Fee Listing (fees current 1 April 2026) — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
- About the Land Owner Transparency Registry — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
- BC Assessment homepage and copyright notice — BC Assessment · openA
- ParcelMap BC Parcel Fabric (PMBC_PARCEL_FABRIC_POLY_SVW), Village of Nakusp — Land Title and Survey Authority of BC via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- Municipalities — Legally Defined Administrative Areas of BC (ABMS_MUNICIPALITIES_SP), Village of Nakusp — BC Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship via BC Geographic Warehouse WFS · openA
- Nakusp Hot Springs, Chalets & Campgrounds — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Airport — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Sale of Municipal Properties — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Notice of Land Disposition — Opportunity to Purchase, PID 015-965-473, updated 3 September 2025 — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Notice of Land Disposition — Property Sold, 320 Shakespeare Road, PID 013-133-225 — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Resolution No. R042/26 — retain ownership of 611 Broadway Street (Kinship Building), and Resolution No. R043/26 — retain ownership of 90 5th Avenue NW (Old Firehall) — Village of Nakusp Council · openA
- Dividends & Legacy Fund — Nakusp & Area Community Forest (2013) Inc. · openA
- Community Forest Agreements — what a CFA is — BC Community Forest Association · openA
- Locations — Interfor Corporation · openA
- Property Transfer Tax Data 2025 — municipal monthly file — BC Ministry of Finance via BC Data Catalogue · openA
- Arrow Lakes Hospital — Interior Health · openA
- Nakusp & District Sports Complex — Village of Nakusp · openA
- BC Corporate Registry registration for NAKUSP & AREA COMMUNITY FOREST (2013) INC., BC0984911 — BC Registries and Online Services via OrgBook BC · openA
- Nakusp Marina — Village of Nakusp · openA
- Local Government Statistics — Schedule 201, General Statistics for 2024, and Schedule 305, Development Charges Restricted Reserve Fund Balances as at 31 December 2024 — BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs · openA