Sidney, British Columbia
Sidney is 509 hectares of land, a $6.5 billion roll that is 87% houses, and the largest landowner in it is the Government of Canada: Transport Canada's Crown-owned share of Victoria International Airport inside the town boundary is 50.69 hectares, and with the Gulf Islands park depot, Tsehum Harbour and a navigation beacon the federal register accounts for 57.2 hectares, 11.2% of the town's dry land. The Town publishes 27 registered corporate owners against their tax bills, and one of them is the Washington State Department of Transportation.
9 buildings · 8 with an owner established · 13 sources · 8 tier A · 1 tier B · prepared 2026-10-03
Can you find out who owns it?
British Columbia's land title register is open to anyone but priced per search: $11.06 for a search under section 377 of the Land Title Act on the LTSA Customer Fee Listing current at 1 April 2026, with no bulk owner product and no price-paid file. The free half of the picture is the Land Owner Transparency Registry, which since 30 November 2020 has required corporations, trusts and partnerships registering an interest in BC land to name the individuals behind them; search opened on 30 April 2021 and a search of the publicly accessible part is priced NIL. A municipal tax certificate for Sidney through LTSA's Tax Certificates Online is $115.26. At this scale the useful substitute for a paid search is the Town's own annual report, which prints a 27-row table headed "Registered Owner" with each company's primary use and the municipal and total tax it was levied, and its permissive exemption notice, which gives a civic address and the organisation holding it for every exempted parcel.
Is ownership public?Public, but one paid search at a time
Cost of one title search$11.06 — "For a search under section 377 or a copy of the search results, or both", listed as "Title Search" on the LTSA Customer Fee Listing as at April 1, 2026. A search of publicly accessible information under section 35 of the Land Owner Transparency Act is priced NIL on the same schedule. A municipal tax certificate through LTSA's Tax Certificates Online is $115.26 for "Sidney, Town".
Bulk ownership dataNone published
Sale pricesAggregates only — no individual sales
Sites that forbid taking their data
- 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.”
1
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Victoria International Airport — the part inside the Town of Sidney Sections 7 to 12, Part of Ranges 1W and 1E to 3E 50.69 ha |
Institutional | His Majesty the King in right of Canada — Transport Canada The Directory of Federal Real Property splits Victoria International Airport (MISC) across two parcels: 418.8003 ha whose municipality is North Saanich and 50.6865 ha whose municipality is Sidney, both interest type Crown Owned, custodian Transport Canada. The Sidney parcel's coordinates fall inside the legal Town of Sidney boundary on the province's ABMS layer. That single federal holding is 10.0% of Sidney's 509 ha of land. The airport is operated by the Victoria Airport Authority, which the Town lists among Council's external appointments, under a lease from Canada: the operator is not the owner, and the register records Canada as the owner. |
Government | —A |
| Mary Winspear Centre 2243 Beacon Avenue |
Civic | Sidney & North Saanich Memorial Park Society The largest permissive exemption in Sidney by a wide margin. The Town's notice under section 227 of the Community Charter lists, under the heading "Property Held By", the Sidney & North Saanich Memorial Park Society at 2243 Beacon Avenue with estimated municipal taxes of $132,592 for 2025, $139,221 for 2026 and $143,398 for 2027 — 43.5% of the $304,527 the Town forgoes across all fourteen exempted properties. The exemption runs ten years, 2025 to 2034 inclusive. The Town's annual report names the Mary Winspear Centre among the organisations it works with. 2243 Beacon Avenue geocodes inside the town boundary. |
Institution | —A |
| SHOAL Centre 10030 Resthaven Drive |
Institutional | Beacon Community Services Second largest exemption. The Town's section 227 notice lists Beacon Community Services at 10030 Resthaven Drive with estimated municipal taxes of $60,900 for 2025, $63,945 for 2026 and $65,864 for 2027, and at two further addresses, 9860 Third Street ($9,579) and 9924 Third Street ($4,108) — $74,587 across three properties in 2025, making it the largest single holder of exempted property in the town after the Memorial Park Society. The Town's annual report names "SHOAL Centre for Seniors" among the organisations it works with. |
Institution | —A |
| Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea 9811 Seaport Place |
Institutional | Town of Sidney Two Town documents describe this site differently and both are recorded. The section 227 exemption notice lists the New Marine Centre Society at 9811 Seaport Place, under the heading "Property Held By", at $14,911 of estimated municipal taxes for 2025. Separately, on 24 September 2026 the Town published a "Notice of Proposed Disposition – Lease for 9811 Seaport Place" — the notice a municipality gives under section 26 of the Community Charter before disposing of an interest in its own land. That notice's body renders by JavaScript, so the term and the lessee are not established. Read together: the Town holds the land, the Society the exempted interest. |
Government | —B |
| Sidney ferry terminal Sidney waterfront, Town of Sidney |
Institutional | Washington State Department of Transportation The Town's 2025 "Principal Corporate Property Tax Payers" table lists, under "Registered Owner", "Washington State Department Of Transportation", primary use "Ferry Terminal", at $68,345 municipal and $166,349 total tax levied — a US state agency on a BC town's roll. The Town separately describes "the Town's ferry terminal", holds a Ferry Terminal statutory reserve of $1,723,411 at the end of 2025, "Completed critical maintenance at the Anacortes Ferry Terminal to protect long-term viability of the equipment should service be restored", and is considering "proposals for alternate uses of the Town's ferry terminal". Two interests, and no document opened divides them. |
Government | —A |
| Gulf Islands National Park Reserve — Sidney Operations Centre and Maintenance Centre 2220 Harbour Road; and Lot A Plan 16864 and Lot 2 Plan 9768, Section 15, Range 3 East, North Saanich District 0.45 ha across two parcels |
Institutional | Parks Canada Agency The federal register holds two Crown-owned Parks Canada parcels inside Sidney: the Gulf Islands NPR Sidney Operations Centre at 2220 Harbour Road, 0.14 ha with three buildings and 1,420 sq m of floor area, and the Gulf Islands NPR Maintenance Centre, 0.31 ha with one building of 139 sq m, whose address is given as a legal description in the North Saanich District even though the parcel municipality is Sidney. The national park reserve itself — 10.698 ha of it in the register — is in North Saanich and the southern Gulf Islands, not in Sidney. The depot is in Sidney; the park is not. |
Government | —A |
| Tsehum Harbour (Shoal Harbour) Resthaven Drive, All Bay; District Lot 469, Cowichan District 5.4633 ha |
Land | His Majesty the King in right of Canada — Fisheries and Oceans Canada The second largest piece of Crown-owned federal land in Sidney after the airport share. The Directory of Federal Real Property records it as custodian Fisheries and Oceans Canada, interest type Crown Owned, primary use Transportation Marine, 5.4633 ha with one building of 48 sq m; the address is given as "Resthaven Drive, All Bay; District Lot 469, Cowichan District" and the parcel municipality as Sidney, and its coordinates fall inside the legal town boundary. DFO separately holds the Sidney Breakwater, Crown Owned at a nominal 0.0001 ha, and a chain of navigation sites in neighbouring North Saanich under land use permits. |
Government | —A |
| Looking Up Developments Ltd. holding not published by the Town |
Industrial | Looking Up Developments Ltd. The largest corporate property taxpayer in Sidney: first on the Town's 2025 "Registered Owner" table, primary use "Warehousing / Distribution", $305,608 of municipal tax and $746,182 of total tax levied — 12.4% of the municipal tax paid by all 27 companies on the table. It is a warehousing holding, not a storefront, which is the shape of the town's non-residential base: Sidney's light-industry assessment is $91.7 million against $730.7 million of business and other. The Town publishes the owner, the use and the tax bill, and no address or legal description. |
Private company | —A |
| Beacon Avenue retail core Beacon Avenue between First and Fifth Streets, Sidney |
Retail | Not established a paid title search would answer it Sidney's commercial heart has no single owner and no document opened names one. The Town's registered-owner table carries twelve companies whose primary use it gives as retail or office/retail — Jim Pattison Developments Ltd., Damka Lumber & Development Ltd., Shew Family Holdings 2022 Ltd., Quonset Green Inc., Hobo Holdings Ltd., Albion Properties Ltd., 360204 BC Ltd., 1350178 BC Ltd., Slegg Holdings Ltd., P & L Holdings Ltd., FHD Nominee Ltd. and West Sidney Business Park Ltd. — but never an address. Which building is whose needs an $11.06 title search per parcel. Canada Post leases its postal station at 2513 Beacon Avenue, proving a landlord exists without naming it. |
Not established | —A |
2
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
Sidney is the smallest of the five municipalities in this batch by land area after Duncan: 509 hectares, 12,951 people, and a roll that is 86.6% residential. Nothing on it is big. The whole town changed hands 436 times in 2025 for $391 million, it issued 38 residential building permits and added 36 net dwelling units, and the largest single property interest inside the boundary belongs to the federal government. ParcelMap BC's public WFS would not answer, so no parcel count is published here.
Total assessed value, 2026 roll$6.55B
$6,549,958,681 for general municipal purposes on the 2026 roll: residential $5,670,260,104, business and other $743,641,901, light industry $85,719,100, recreation and non-profit $47,828,400, utilities $2,407,200, farm $101,976; major industry and managed forest land nil. BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Local Government Statistics Schedule 701. The Town's own 2025 Annual Report gives taxable assessment of land and improvements on the BC Assessment revised roll as $6,400,186 thousand for 2025, $6,396,915 for 2024, $6,329,755 for 2023, $5,582,040 for 2022 and $4,616,757 for 2021 — a 38.6% rise in four years, almost all of it residential.
Federal land as a share of the town57.18 ha, 11.2% of the land area
Summing the Crown Owned interests the Directory of Federal Real Property attributes to the municipality of Sidney: Victoria International Airport 50.6865 ha, Tsehum Harbour 5.4633 ha, the Sidney Middle Marker navigation site on Ocean Street (Lot 2, plan VIP 89480) 0.5815 ha, the Gulf Islands NPR Maintenance Centre 0.31 ha, the Sidney Operations Centre 0.14 ha and the Sidney Breakwater at a nominal 0.0001 ha — 57.1814 ha against Schedule 201's 509 ha of land, 11.2%. Every one of the six was tested by point-in-polygon against the province's legal boundary layer and falls inside it.
Concentration of the corporate tax base27 owners, $2.47M municipal / $5.93M total
The Town's 2025 "Principal Corporate Property Tax Payers" table, headed "Registered Owner" with a "Primary Use" column, runs to 27 companies and totals $2,474,467 of municipal tax and $5,925,763 of total tax levied. Six are hotels or marinas, six are manufacturing or industrial, twelve are retail or office, one is a senior care facility and one is the Washington State Department of Transportation. The table is explicitly corporate, which is why no private individual appears on it.
Permissive exemptions, 2025–2034$304,527 in 2025
The Town's notice under section 227 of the Community Charter, considered at the 23 September and 15 October 2024 Council meetings, grants ten-year exemptions for 2025 to 2034 to fourteen properties, with one (2281 Mills Road, Broadmead Care Society) for two years only. Estimated municipal taxes forgone: $304,527 in 2025, $319,753 in 2026 and $312,437 in 2027. The notice gives the organisation and the civic address for each, under the heading "Property Held By".
Whole-town turnover, 2025436 sales, $391.0M
436 market transactions in the Town of Sidney across 2025 — 427 residential, 9 commercial, none industrial — with total fair market value of $391,000,258 and $6,331,159 of property transfer tax paid. BC Ministry of Finance property transfer tax data 2025, municipal monthly file, jurisdiction 476. The corporate-transaction count is suppressed as "nr" in 10 of the 12 months, which at nine commercial sales a year is most of the information.
Population and area12,951 people; 509 ha of land
Schedule 201, General Statistics for 2024: 2021 Census population 12,318, BC Stats estimate 12,951; land 509 ha, water 221 ha, total 730 ha. The province's ABMS legal boundary layer independently returns 729.9 ha. At 25.4 people per hectare of land Sidney is the densest of the five municipalities in this batch.
Tangible capital assets and new construction$121.5M of assets; 36 net new units
"The 2025 year ending TCA balance was $121,476,096", an increase of $2,289,255 over 2024, from $6.0 million of net investment less $3.7 million of amortisation; the annual report does not break land out of the total. New construction in 2025: 38 residential permits worth $16,591,661 adding 36 net units, and 13 commercial permits worth $1,892,765, for 51 permits and $18,484,426 — against 29 permits and $12.6 million in 2024 and 88 permits and $33.5 million in 2021. Building Officials issued 155 permits of all kinds in 2025 with a combined construction value of $19,894,968.
3
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 in Sidney concentrates in three places and in none of them is it a landlord empire. The federal government holds 57.2 hectares, 11.2% of the town's land, almost all of it airport. The Town holds $121.5 million of tangible capital assets and the ground under the Shaw Centre. And 27 corporations hold the commercial and industrial base, of which the largest is a warehousing company. Nobody opened here publishes a holding in Sidney measured in acres or square feet; the Town measures its owners in tax dollars, and that is the only quantity available.
| Name | Type | Holding |
|---|---|---|
| Government of Canada Six Crown Owned interests: Victoria International Airport 50.6865 ha (Transport Canada), Tsehum Harbour 5.4633 ha (Fisheries and Oceans), the Sidney Middle Marker navigation site 0.5815 ha (Transport Canada), the Gulf Islands NPR Maintenance Centre 0.31 ha and Sidney Operations Centre 0.14 ha (Parks Canada) and the Sidney Breakwater. Canada is also a tenant at three Sidney addresses — the postal station at 2513 Beacon Avenue, the letter carrier depot at 2065 Mills Road and the RCMP Sidney–North Saanich Detachment at 9895 Fourth Street plus an office at 9884 3rd Street — all recorded as "Lease or Licence", which proves a private or municipal landlord exists without naming one. |
Government | 57.18 ha Crown Owned, 11.2% of the town's land; plus 3 leased sitesA |
| Town of Sidney The annual report gives the 2025 year-end TCA balance and does not separate land from improvements, so no land figure is published here. The Town holds a Ferry Terminal reserve of $1,723,411, a Land Sale Proceeds reserve of $87,175 and a Parkland Acquisition reserve of $242,873 within $14,706,136 of total reserves, and in September 2026 gave notice of a proposed disposition by lease of 9811 Seaport Place. |
Government | $121,476,096 of tangible capital assets; $14.7M of reservesA |
| Sidney & North Saanich Memorial Park Society 2243 Beacon Avenue, the Mary Winspear Centre. The single largest exempted holding in the town, 43.5% of all municipal tax Sidney forgoes, exempt for ten years to 2034. |
Institution | $132,592 of municipal taxes forgone, 2025A |
| Beacon Community Services 10030 Resthaven Drive ($60,900), 9860 Third Street ($9,579) and 9924 Third Street ($4,108) on the Town's section 227 notice — the largest multi-property non-profit holder in Sidney. |
Institution | $74,587 of municipal taxes forgone across three properties, 2025A |
| Privately held land (owner not published) 86.6% of Sidney's roll is residential and no public dataset names the owner of any of it. The Town's registered-owner table is explicitly corporate and stops at 27 names; everything below that line, and all housing held directly by individuals, needs an $11.06 title search parcel by parcel. The Land Owner Transparency Registry reaches only land held through a corporation, trust or partnership. |
Private company | $5.67 billion of residential assessment on the 2026 rollA |
5
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 in Sidney to name. The Town added 36 net dwelling units in 2025 across 38 residential permits worth $16.6 million, and has four development applications on its website, all of which render their bodies by JavaScript and name no applicant in readable text. CMHC's starts series does not reach a town of 12,951 inside the Victoria census metropolitan area. What the Town does publish is who holds the housing and care property, through its registered-owner table and its exemption notice, and those are the entities below. A thin list here is the right answer, not a gap.
| Name | Type | Tax or exemption, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| FHD Nominee Ltd. Second largest corporate taxpayer in Sidney and the only one whose primary use the Town gives as "Residential Rental / Retail" — which makes it, on the Town's own table, the largest identified rental-housing owner in the town. No address is published against the name. |
Private company | $177,388 municipal / $378,591 total taxA |
| Trillium (Sidney) Holdings Ltd. Primary use "Senior Care Facility" on the Town's 2025 registered-owner table, the ninth largest corporate tax bill in the town. Seniors' housing is the one residential asset class with a named corporate owner here. |
Private company | $120,682 municipal / $224,965 total taxA |
| Broadmead Care Society 2281 Mills Road, named under "Property Held By" in the Town's section 227 notice. Alone among the fourteen exempted properties it was granted a two-year exemption for 2025 and 2026 only, rather than the ten-year term given to the rest. |
Institution | $15,635 of municipal taxes forgone, 2025A |
| St. Andrew's Abbeyfield Housing Society 10017 Fifth Street, named in the Town's section 227 notice, exempt 2025 to 2034. |
Institution | $4,361 of municipal taxes forgone, 2025A |
| The Town of Sidney's own permit record (not a builder) The Town's 2025 new-construction table, which also counts 5 units added by adding a legal suite within "TOTAL NEW UNITS 36". Its five-year series is 36 net units in 2025, 21 in 2024, 64 in 2023, 54 in 2022 and 83 in 2021 — 258 dwellings in five years in a town of 12,951. |
Government | 38 residential permits, $16,591,661, 36 net unitsA |
6
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
Sidney's non-residential base is $730.7 million of business and other and $91.7 million of light industry, and the Town names the companies that hold it. Twenty-seven corporate owners pay $2,474,467 of municipal tax between them; the top of the list is not retail but warehousing and distribution, and six of the 27 are hotels or marinas, which is what a seaside town of 12,951 with an international airport and a cross-border ferry berth looks like on a tax roll.
| Name | Type | Municipal tax levied, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Looking Up Developments Ltd. Warehousing / Distribution. First on the Town's registered-owner table and 12.4% of the municipal tax paid by all 27 companies on it. |
Private company | $305,608 municipal / $746,182 totalA |
| Slegg Developments Ltd. and Slegg Holdings Ltd. Two separate lines on the Town's table: Slegg Developments Ltd., Manufacturing / Retail, $152,590 municipal and $372,054 total; and Slegg Holdings Ltd., Office / Retail, $68,726 and $178,944. Taken together the largest private interest in Sidney's commercial property by tax bill after the warehousing holding at the top. |
Family / private | $221,316 municipal / $550,998 total across two entitiesA |
| Sidney Marina Co. Ltd. and Port Sidney Marina Inc. Sidney Marina Co Ltd, "Marina / Boat Storage / Charters", $162,978 municipal and $331,175 total; Port Sidney Marina Inc, "Marina", $72,658 and $143,804. The waterfront is the second concentration of commercial value in the town after the industrial park. |
Private company | $235,636 municipal / $474,979 total across two entitiesA |
| The hotel owners — 0928818 BC Ltd., Sidney Pier Properties Ltd., P & L Holdings Ltd., Emerald Isle Hotels Inc. Four of the 27 companies on the Town's table have a primary use of Hotel or Hotel/Office/Retail: 0928818 BC Ltd ($101,177 municipal, $263,593 total), Sidney Pier Properties Ltd ($94,753, $229,488), P & L Holdings Ltd ($82,376, $214,020) and Emerald Isle Hotels Inc ($79,598, $207,304). The Town gives no addresses, so no hotel is matched to an owner here. |
Private company | $357,904 municipal / $914,405 total across four entitiesA |
| Jim Pattison Developments Ltd. Primary use Retail, sixth on the Town's registered-owner table — the only nationally known holding company on it, and the Town publishes no address against the name. |
Family / private | $98,987 municipal / $257,880 totalA |
| Washington State Department of Transportation Primary use Ferry Terminal. A foreign state agency as a registered owner and ratepayer in a Canadian municipality, still assessed and still levied while the Sidney–Anacortes service is suspended and the Town is "advocating for early restoration". |
Government | $68,345 municipal / $166,349 totalA |
?
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- ParcelMap BC parcel counts, ownership-class splits and titled-area figures for Sidney. The province's public WFS returned HTTP 504 and GeoServer connection-pool timeouts to every request over several hours.
- Which parcels carry the 27 corporate tax bills the Town publishes. The table gives the registered owner, a primary use and two tax figures, and no address or legal description for any of them — so no hotel, marina, warehouse or shop on Beacon Avenue is matched to an owner in this record.
- The terms of the proposed lease of 9811 Seaport Place and who the proposed lessee is. The Town's notice of 24 September 2026 renders its body by JavaScript and the WordPress REST API returns the record with content empty.
- How the Washington State Department of Transportation's ferry terminal interest and the Town's own ferry terminal relate — whether the Town owns the berth and WSDOT the upland, or the reverse. Both interests are documented and no source opened divides them.
- The applicants or owners behind Sidney's four live development applications at 2180 Beacon Avenue W, 9633 Third Street, 2257–2317 Harbour Road and 2130 James White Boulevard West. Every one of those pages serves only a breadcrumb.
- The highest assessed single parcel in Sidney in dollars. BC Assessment holds it and its site forbids commercial use of the data outright.
- A land figure for the Town of Sidney's own holdings. The annual report gives a single tangible-capital-asset balance of $121,476,096 and no land line, unlike Port Moody's, which separates land at cost.
- A housing starts series for Sidney. CMHC's published series does not reach a town of this size inside the Victoria census metropolitan area, so the Town's own permit and net-unit counts are the only measure.
- BC publishes no price-paid file. Sidney's 2025 corporate-transaction count is suppressed as "nr" in 10 of 12 months, against nine commercial sales in the whole year.
§
Sources
- Fees — LTSA Customer Fee Listing as at April 1, 2026, Searches table and Tax Certificates Online participating-municipality table — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
- About the Land Owner Transparency Registry — important dates — Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia · openA
- BC Assessment home page, terms of use and copyright notice — BC Assessment · openA
- Local Government Statistics — Schedule 701, Assessed Values for the year 2026 — BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs · openA
- Local Government Statistics — Schedule 201, General Statistics for 2024 — BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs · openA
- Property Transfer Tax Data 2025 — municipal monthly file — BC Ministry of Finance / BC Data Catalogue · openA
- Directory of Federal Real Property — open data extract (dfrp-rbif.xml), rows whose parcel Municipality or Metro Area names the city — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat · openA
- BC Physical Address Geocoder — GeoBC / Province of British Columbia · openA
- Municipalities — Legally Defined Administrative Areas of BC (ABMS_MUNICIPALITIES_SP), WFS, legal boundary polygons used for point-in-polygon checks — GeoBC / BC Data Catalogue · openA
- Notice of Permissive Tax Exemption, section 227 Community Charter — fourteen properties under the heading "Property Held By", with civic addresses and estimated municipal taxes for 2025, 2026 and 2027 — Town of Sidney · openA
- 2025 Annual Report — Town of Sidney (Principal Corporate Property Tax Payers, 27 rows under "Registered Owner"; Taxable Assessment of Land & Improvements 2021–2025; New Construction 2021–2025; Reserve Funds; Management Discussion and Analysis) — Town of Sidney · openA
- Notice of Proposed Disposition – Lease for 9811 Seaport Place (title and publication date only; body renders by JavaScript) — Town of Sidney · openB
- Annual Report index page, Town of Sidney (2025 report "Approved by Council on June 22, 2026") — Town of Sidney · openA