Alberta

The City of St. Albert wants to actively pursue with landowners the development of designated industrial lands in the southwest and southeast corners of the city, to accommodate industrial growth for the next several years. But there is a hitch.

Building activity in Red Deer remained in bounce-back mode for 2011.

The central Alberta city of Wetaskiwin, known as the car-buying capital of Alberta, has rolled closer to a fancy new aquatic centre, but not without agreeing to take on more debt.

With large investors buying apartment blocks, the rental vacancy falling and the oil-fired city economy booming, developers have started or built more than 1,800 new rental apartments in Edmonton in the past year.

$1,000 per-square-foot Its results: sales that hit the annual $1,000-per-square-foot milestone for the period ending September 2011.

A shared ownership concept that has been used in B.C. for more than a decade to finance hotel development appears to be ending as investors face staggering losses in hotel-condos and fractional real estate plays.

A record sale price for a Calgary condominium - $8.3 million - is the latest signal of a muscular residential market re-emerging in Alberta's largest city.

Calgary-based Resorts of the Canadian Rockies has purchased the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort near Golden, B.C. from Dutch-based Ballast Nedam. While the purchase price was not disclosed, Western Investor sources say it was close to $28 million.

The stock market was rolling through rougher times in late 2011, but that has had little effect on the office space market in Calgary, where new space continues to be gobbled up in the city's bustling downtown.

A surging petroleum sector is credited with lower vacancy rates in the Edmonton industrial property market. Vacancy rates in both Edmonton and the surrounding area dropped in the third quarter of 2011, according to industrial surveys.