Nanaimo, British Columbia

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.

The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.

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.

Nanaimo is a city where exactly one large landholding is itemised in public and it belongs to the municipality. The City holds 1,477 titled parcels covering 1,278.8 hectares — 16.1% of the city's titled surface area, more than twice the share the Province and its agencies hold between them — and carries $130.9 million of land at cost. Beyond that, the public record thins out fast: the senior-government shares are known by class and not by holder, the port's own site will not open to a script, and the 27,678 private surface parcels are anonymous at any price under $11.06 each. The nearest thing to a private land holding on the record is a conservation one: The Nature Trust of BC takes the second-largest permissive tax exemption in the city.

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.

The City of Nanaimo publishes a monthly building-permit statistics report and it is the count of record: 2025 ran to 646 permits worth $386,895,705 and 676 new dwelling units, of which 254 came in multi-unit buildings, 81 were single dwellings and 99 were secondary suites — 31 of them inside new single dwellings, 20 in accessory buildings and 47 added to existing houses. One line dominates the money: public permits were worth $229,058,695 of the year's total, including $143,518,283 in October alone and 266 accessory residential units permitted in April. Who builds the private half is answerable only from a licence register, not from output: British Columbia publishes no homes-per-builder table and BC Housing's registry gives no unit counts. A By-City search for Nanaimo returns 228 licences in good standing out of 8,022 province-wide, 213 of them held by companies or under trade names; individuals' licences are not listed here. The builders below are the longest-standing of that group by licence number, which is the only ordering the register supports.

The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.

Nanaimo is the rare mid-size Canadian city where the two biggest retail landlords are both documented on their own websites, and neither is a REIT. Central Walk, a private operator whose whole Canadian portfolio is three properties, holds Vancouver Island's largest shopping centre; Anthem Properties holds the downtown block and the high-street retail under the City's conference centre. Everything else in the $3.60 billion business-and-other class is unattributed: no Nanaimo asset appears on Morguard's leasing site, the two other enclosed centres' websites will not connect at all, and BC Assessment's values may not be reused commercially.

Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.

1. Fees — LTSA Customer Fee Listing (fees as at April 1, 2026), the Land Owner Transparency Act fee schedule and the Tax Certificates Online participating-municipality table — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
2. About the Land Owner Transparency Registry — filings required from 30 November 2020; "Search of information in LOTR began" 30 April 2021; 30 November 2022 deadline for reporting bodies with an existing interest in land — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
3. BC Assessment homepage, terms of use and copyright notice — BC Assessment · openA
4. Local Government Statistics — Schedule 701, Assessed Values for the year 2026 (162 municipalities) — BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs · openA
5. Property Transfer Tax Data 2025 — municipal monthly file — BC Ministry of Finance · openA
6. ParcelMap BC Parcel Fabric (PMBC_PARCEL_FABRIC_POLY_SVW) — active parcels by OWNER_TYPE and PARCEL_CLASS, extracted October 2026 by paging a BBOX query in EPSG:3005 over the municipal bounding box and filtering on MUNICIPALITY; building strata, air space and interest parcels excluded from area arithmetic. Derived aggregates only, no rows reproduced — Province of British Columbia (openmaps WFS) · openA
7. Municipalities — Legally Defined Administrative Areas of BC (ABMS_MUNICIPALITIES_SP): City of Nanaimo 12,284.8 ha — Province of British Columbia (openmaps WFS) · openA
8. BC Housing Licence Registry — residential builder licences in good standing, By-City search for Nanaimo (228 of 8,022 province-wide) — BC Housing, Licensing & Consumer Services · openA
9. Building Permits — Monthly Statistics to 31 December 2025, City of Nanaimo — City of Nanaimo · openA
10. Our Portfolio and the Woodgrove Centre property page (748,000 sq ft, 140+ stores, Vancouver Island's largest shopping centre); and woodgrovecentre.com, which carries 6631 Island Highway North and the footer "© 2021 Central Walk" — Central Walk · openA
11. Port Place & VICC — commercial property record (GLA 150,007 sq ft; 134,478 sf retail and office plus 15,529 sf under the conference centre; fully leased); and portplace.ca's "Other Anthem Centres" list; and anthemproperties.com's company figures — Anthem Properties Group · openA
12. City of Nanaimo 2025 Annual Municipal Report and 2025 Annual Financial Statements — Note 10 tangible capital assets, the segmented statements including the Vancouver Island Conference Centre, the general assessment by property class, and Permissive Tax Exemptions for 2025 (Bylaw 7538), $2,449,546.88 in total — City of Nanaimo · openA
13. City Owned Property — the Real Estate section's mandate, surplus-property policy, and the BC Builds sites at 6 Commercial Street and 474 Pine Street — City of Nanaimo · openA
14. Open Government Licence – British Columbia: "a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the Information, including for commercial purposes" — Province of British Columbia · openA
15. 2025 Annual Financial Statements, City of Nanaimo (audited, KPMG; Schedule of Tangible Capital Assets and Note 10) — City of Nanaimo · openA