After 27 years of sitting empty, a long-neglected building in Surrey may soon come to life 鈥� this time for real, according to commercial real estate agents who brokered a $56.5-million, court-ordered deal for the 104 Avenue property.
The 274,285-square-foot complex, built in 1998 at 142 Street, is notorious for never having any commercial tenants.
finally closed last week after nearly a year of hearings in Vancouver. The new owner doesn't want to go public just yet, leaving Colliers agents Dylan Sohi and Mike Grewal to speak on his behalf.
"The purchaser just wants to bring life to this part of the community," Sohi said in a May 21 meeting with the Now-Leader at the site. "There's a significant amount of retail space here as well. It'd be great to see this community animated now, this building animated."
In April 2022, and later said it was fully leased, but today there's still no sign of commercial activity in Westfield Business Centre, as he called it.
In a case of court-ordered sale, a property is sold by court order, often after a lender forecloses on the property due to unpaid debts.
"I can't speak to anything that happened here in the past," Sohi said, "but the new owner is a prominent member of the community and has done a significant amount of developments. He knows the area well and will be getting started ASAP on getting the ball rolling on construction happening here."
Some "significant" renovations and improvements are needed to bring the building to code, Sohi confirmed.
"I'm not an engineer so I can't go into too much detail there, but like with any building, if you don't use systems for a few years, you gotta get in and repair them,' He said. "In this case systems weren't managed for 26 years, give or take, and in fact the building was never fully completed, so a lot of these major building components 鈥� HVAC, plumbing, electrical 鈥� they weren't fully completed. It's a significant undertaking, multi-million dollars, many months, you know. If I had to guess, I'd say six to 12 months to complete these various works."
Grewal said the 104 Avenue building sale has been "one of the longest and most comprehensive deals" he's ever done.
"With foreclosures, they're never easy, and especially this one, there's just been so much back and forth," Grewal said. "There's been appeals to the decision by the court. There were chances that it was gonna get appealed yesterday again and it finally got put through, so we're just waiting for registration this morning."
"Even the lawyers involved, they said this was the most complex deal that they've worked on, as far as a foreclosure. They've never seen anything like this. The court was packed every day there was a hearing."
In the late-1990s, developers originally planned for an Asian-themed 鈥渟howmart鈥� facility in the building, but those plans were scrubbed. American lawyer Donald Pitt, who helped launch the Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team decades ago, bought the building in the mid-2000s. Since then, prospective renters and/or buyers have included Fraser Health, Simon Fraser University and RCMP, but all deals eventually didn鈥檛 happen.
The building has been used by film crews over the years, and potential uses have included banquet hall, office space, homes, restaurants, bowling alley, even an auto-sales lot on the ground floor, none of which ever materialized.
