Tausi Insider

Salmo, a small mountain village in interior B.C., has seen average property values increase by 60 per cent from $199,000 before the start of the pandemic to $319,000 in July 2021, upending years of a relatively flat market Salmaan Farooqui/Tausi Insider For years, Salmo, B.C., was the kind of place travellers would drive by without noticing. It isn’t even on the main highway tourists use in the province. Nestled at the bottom of the Kootenay Pass, one of Canada’s highest mountain pass highways open year-round, the southern B.C. village of roughly 1,000 people was mostly a place to fill up with gas after a hair-raising drive. With an out-of-the-way location that is roughly eight hours of mountain driving from Calgary or Vancouver, property has always been cheap. But like a gentrifying neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, the sense that things are changing is palpable. More young families with strollers can be seen walking through the village centre. A craft brewery opened in 2020 that w...

Interest in undeveloped land and the money spent building homes has skyrocketed in B.C. J.P. MOCZULSKI/Tausi Insider There’s a scene that plays out all too often at Gerald Christie’s regional district office: Someone will walk in with high hopes to build their dream home on an undeveloped piece of property they just bought, only to find out the massive financial hurdles they didn’t realize they’ll face. Mr. Christie, manager of development services for the Columbia Shuswap Regional District (CSRD) in Salmon Arm, B.C., said those owners could have saved themselves a lot of grief if they’d done their due diligence. Interest in undeveloped land and the money spent building homes has skyrocketed in that part of the province’s Interior. The CSRD issued 1,187 building and planning permits between 2016 and 2019. That number nearly doubled to 2,177 permits for the period from January, 2020 to November, 2022. In larger regions such as the Greater Toronto Area, undeveloped land remains a fasci...