The court-approved sale of a long-vacant Surrey building could trigger some movement on the dormant commercial property in coming months.
Last June, a listing for court-ordered sale was posted for 104 Avenue Centre, aka The West Field, on 104 Avenue at 142 Street.
Constructed in 1998, the 274,285-square-foot building is notorious for never having any commercial or retail tenants over the past two-plus decades.
Last month a buyer was found for the building, according to a Feb. 7 report on storeys.com, a real estate news website, based on filings in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. A numbered company (1262066 BC Ltd.) is identified as the buyer, described as "a well-known and respected company" in court documents, for $57 million.
Reached Monday (Feb. 10), Colliers Executive Vice-President Bill Randall confirmed "a court-approved sale that has not closed.… If all went according to plan, we're looking at the middle of April (for the sale to close)."
Randall called it "a non-arms-length transaction" that would see the new owners "definitely" keep the building.
"There's a few tenants that they're talking to, and some of those discussions have progressed. You know, the building is very leaseable if somebody has the funds to get it up to code and do some TIs (tenant improvements). Certainly recently, there's been a lot of interest for tenancies. The plan is definitely to keep it and rent it out."
In April 2022, Kuldeep Bansal purchased the building for $55 million and later said it was fully leased, but today there's still no sign of commercial activity in the "campus style" complex, which occupies an entire city block.
"It's a local real estate company that's qualified," Randall said of the prospective building buyer. "They're not my client, I do know them, and I would say they're qualified, yes. If you're in the real estate business, you would probably know who they were. It's certainly not Microsoft or something like that."
In the mid-1990s, developers originally planned for an Asian-themed “showmart” facility on 104 Avenue, 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. Construction was completed at that time. Since then, prospective renters and/or buyers have included Fraser Health, Simon Fraser University and RCMP, but all deals eventually didn’t 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.
