Sometimes it’s important to own instead of renting and sometimes it’s a question of: Why go all the way downtown?

An office-condo project in Country Hills in the northern end of Calgary offers one possible solution, with units starting at 1,600 square feet, says developer Jeff Proudfoot, president of JNP Investments Ltd. of Lethbridge.

Construction started in September on the two-storey, 24,300-sq.-ft. building overlooking the winding Country Hills golf course.

The parking area will be built larger than usual for a building of its size, with landscaping helping to soften the exterior look.

Illustration courtesy of riddell kurczaba
The new Country Hills Landing office-condo project in Calgary will take away commuting hassles from business owners

Walls can still be repositioned for those who want suites larger than 1,600 sq. ft., Proudfoot says.

Ed Dorosz of Avison Young Commercial Real Estate notes that buyers won’t experience maintenance hassles but will still own their premises that will likely appreciate in value.

“A lot of business owners are living in the communities up in the northwest and they don’t need to go downtown,” Dorosz says.

Potential tenants or owners could range from accounting to IT businesses.

It’s estimated that about 64,000 people live within five minutes’ drive of the new site and about 170,000 are only 10 minutes away.

Illustration courtesy of Acquest


Growth over the next decade could put more than 205,000 people within that radius, he says. Grady Stevenson, marketing principal at Acquest Properties Ltd., says 20 per cent of the city’s growth will be in the north-central area,with Deerfoot Trail acting as the main artery and a ring road around the city in the works.

Two buildings at the Freeport Commercial Centre – part of Acquest’s own Freeport development north of the airport at Country Hills Boulevard and Barlow Trail N.W – will soon be built.

One will be a flex building, which will feature both office and distribution space, and the other will be a distribution building.

In addition, a Toyota dealership will be opening next year on the same parcel of land.

Westfair Foods is already operating in its 280,000-sq.-ft. building at Freeport. It could build out to a million sq. ft. in three to five years, says Stevenson.

Acquest has also applied to build three more buildings of high-end professional space for businesses serving the airport or the expanding north-central residential market.

Meanwhile, Opus Building Corp. has two sites left at its site south of Deerfoot Mall, one of 2.56 acres and the other of 2.77 acres. It will either sell the land and put up a building, or offer a build-to-suit lease deal.

At the other end of the city, Opus is building Sunpark professional centre, a combination condominium-medical offices project.

The three-storey structure in Calgary’s southeastern region will feature about 69,000 sq. ft. and should be ready for new tenants sometime in the coming year.

LETHBRIDGE SEEKS IDEAS

Lethbridge is looking for ideas on redeveloping a prime site in the core of the southern Alberta city.

The two blocks fronting First and Second Avenues are located in a key heritage area, near shopping and tourism areas.

Felix Michna, manager of real estate and land development for Lethbridge, says the idea is to revitalize the downtown. Like other cities, Lethbridge would like to attract more residential accommodation to its core.

Deadline for filing expressions of interest is 3 p.m. December 2.

BUILDING BOOMING

The nation’s homebuilders set another monthly record for building permits in September, Statistics Canada reports.

Permit values jumped 10 per cent across the country, hitting $2.9 billion. The previous record was $2.86 billion in July.

The rise means a busy winter in residential construction, says the federal statistical agency.

Non-residential permits also rose in September, climbing 4.5 per cent to $1.5 billion.

The results for the first three quarters make 2003 look like an exceptional year, Statscan said. Permits totalled $38.3 billion from January to September, a rise of 9.3 per cent from the first nine months of 2002. Of the total, $23.6 billion was for residential building and $14.7 billion for non-residential.

Statscan says its building permits survey covers 2,350 municipalities and 95 per cent of the population.