An artist rendering of the Stratosphere Business Centre planned for the Kelowna Airport Industrial Park.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/City of Kelowna

A company describing itself as Western Canada’s largest developer and manager of industrial land is moving into Kelowna in a big way.

Beedie, based in Burnaby, bought 14.7 acres of bare industrial land across from the Kelowna airport. The company says in a news release issued today, April 1, that it’s the “largest, single property, industrial land transaction by dollar value in the city’s history.”

A four-acre industrial property sold in downtown Kelowna for almost $24 million in December last year but it contains an old B.C. Tree Fruit building, as opposed to bare land. It’s next to the Tolko Industries mill site so it is likely to be redeveloped to uses other than industrial.

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The Airport Industrial Park property, at 2050 Pier Mac Way, was assessed by B.C. Assessments last year (as of July 1) at $10,228,000 but land prices of increased since then.

The news release does not say how much Beedie paid for the land.

Beedie is applying to the City of Kelowna to subdivide the land and build two buildings on 6.6 acres of the property to be called the Stratosphere Business Centre. They will total 144,462 square feet, which is larger than the old Costco building in Kelowna.

“Kelowna is a key node between British Columbia and Alberta and I’m excited for Beedie to enter this highly impactful market,” Beedie president, Ryan Beedie, said in a news release. “The Okanagan continues to see a huge amount of growth in the industrial and businesses sectors and we’re looking to support that growth with a very unique offering within the region.”

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Beedie describes itself, in the press release, as “one of the largest private industrial landowner, developer, and property managers in Canada,” and the largest in Western Canada with more than 35 million square feet of industrial construction in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario.

“Demand for light industrial, distribution, third party logistics, and food warehousing space in Metro Vancouver have soared as a result of COVID-19, naturally forcing companies to shift their focus and consider new markets”, Travis Blanleil, sales associate at CBRE, the real estate company that  represented Beedie in the deal, said in the news release.

“Kelowna has become a viable and strategic market for companies looking to expand operations or set up new ventures. With the rapidly growing population in the Okanagan and demand for industrial at an all-time high, Beedie’s new project will provide a unique opportunity for businesses to own their industrial space in a market experiencing a 1% vacancy.”

The area in blue in this submitted photo shows the land where a proposed business park could be built.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Beedie

— This story was corrected at 1:13 p.m. Friday, April 1, 2022, to say Beedie is a Burnaby-based company, not Toronto-based.

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