Douglas Todd: “We’ve got a whole bunch of people, from all over the world, who use Vancouver as a resort,” says Ross McCredie, CEO of Sutton Group. “And you start thinking, ‘How can our kids compete to buy real estate?'”
Ross McCredie’s parents immigrated from Ireland to London, Ont., established professions, bought a farm, became deeply involved in their community, and along the way paid their fair share of taxes.
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They created a good southern Ontario life for young McCredie, who is now the CEO of Sutton Group, one of the largest real estate firms in the country. Still, at age 15, when McCredie saw the West Coast mountains for the first time, he thought he had discovered one of the most amazing places on Earth.
So, after studying literature at university in the East, McCredie made his way to B.C., where he has become one of the biggest players in property development in Whistler and Metro Vancouver.
After founding Sotheby’s International Realty Canada, he purchased Sutton Group in 2023. It has more than 6,000 realtors. He has been heavily involved in developments such as Whistler’s Pan Pacific and Four Seasons, and Vancouver’s Georgia Hotel residential tower.
Over his decades in real estate, however, McCredie, now 58, has become disturbed by what is happening to the housing industry.
With prices soaring into severe unaffordability, he is worried that Metro Vancouver has become a place mostly for the rich.
Faced with the runaway costs of living, young workers, even doctors and lawyers, are losing hope of putting down roots in home ownership.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of people, from all over the world, who use Vancouver as a resort,” McCredie said. “And you start thinking, ‘How can our kids compete to buy real estate when we’ve had 20 to 30 years of migration policy that’s been based on bringing wealthy people in?’ It totally accelerated our housing market and everybody got addicted to the money.”
McCredie doesn’t fault developers who gained from marketing to investors from outside B.C., whether from Alberta or offshore. But he said it’s “not a way to create viable, livable communities. Now we’ve got a lot of condos, like in Coal Harbour. And no one lives there. When they do come, they’re just here for six weeks.”
If you happen to be a small-business owner who opened a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, McCredie said, you soon discovered that “there’s nobody around. My point is that Vancouver has become this resort playground. And too many people are only here for varying degrees of time. As a result, I think the quality of life for a lot of people who live in Vancouver is not getting better.”
McCredie appreciates the many newcomers who, like his immigrant parents long ago, get deeply involved in their new communities, create businesses, work and pay their share of income taxes.
An online real estate media outlet last year referred to McCredie as a “disruptor.” It described him as “an insider with an outsider’s mentality.”
Although McCredie’s not entirely sure about the label, saying, “I’m not pounding my chest saying I’m going to disrupt anything,” he doesn’t believe the real estate industry has paid nearly enough attention to properly serving homeowners, potential homeowners and the people of B.C. “All the business models have been about making money. But we’re supposed to be acting in the best interests of our client.”
One of his biggest frustrations, for instance, is the dearth of information prospective buyers and sellers can obtain on any property. Canada is probably the worst of any G7 country, he said, for offering the public so little information on such things as the history and past ownership of dwellings. He’s working with people like Al-Karim Kara, head of B.C. Land Title authority, to make it possible for the public to access more free property data in the future.
That, he said, will help a great deal of people, including buyers, planners and developers, stay on top of fast-changing trends in the real estate world, particularly in Metro Vancouver, where for decades the emphasis has been on producing residential apartment towers “for investors to buy and rent out.”
But the condo investor market is now in big trouble, he said. “We’ve got a situation where a huge part of our economy is in real estate, mostly building condos. And that’s all coming to an end.”
There are almost no more pre-sales occurring, he said, referring to the way floods of investors had been buying Metro apartment units before they were built. He is glad the B.C. government cracked down on such condos being flipped.
“And a good chunk of them were sold to foreign investors” who intended to rent them out. “And now we’re in a place where rental rates are coming down and will continue to come down.”
McCredie said the Oakridge Park project, being built by Westbank and QuadReal, should have been “phased in over a period of time,” rather than being rushed to completion later this year.
“I think that it will be the single largest loss for a housing developer in Canadian history.”