ICT Group and Lark Group’s Health and Technology District in downtown Surrey expanded November 14 as it broke ground on the City Centre 4 building, the largest phase to date.
The building is a part of eight developments that, when completed, will make up the largest health and technology hub of its kind in Canada.
City Centre 4 will consist of 23 storeys and more than 350,000 square feet of office space available for strata purchase or lease. In addition, the building has five floors or 75,000 square feet of wet lab space, with additional possibilities to expand up to a million square feet of wet lab space in the future building phases, according to Lark Group.
The area is emerging as a centre for tech companies, scientists, educators and health professionals, each representing a range of business, technology and research fields.
“We are blazing a trail in Surrey’s business and innovation landscape with the continuing expansion and growth momentum of the Health and Technology District,” said Kirk Fisher, senior vice-president of Lark Group, in a media statement.
Surrey, the second-biggest city in B.C., has a 4.4 per cent office vacancy rate, compared with a 7 per cent vacancy in Vancouver and 4.6 per cent average office vacancy in Metro Vancouver suburban markets, according to a third-quarter 2022 report from Colliers.
Central Surrey is connected to Vancouver by SkyTrain and a SkyTrain extension to Langley is in the works, noted Rowena Rizzotti, vice-president of healthcare and innovations at the Health and Technology District. The building will also be immediately adjacent to Surrey Memorial Hospital, one of Canada’s busiest hospitals.
The growth in the area can be seen in the increasing interest for space in the district with City Centre 2 selling out noticeably faster than City Centre 1, according to Rizzotti.
“City Center 3 was almost unprecedented and that was sold out prior to even being completed. And then that has also accelerated the interest in demand and there's millions of dollars in pre-sales already in City Centre 4,” she said in an interview with Business in Vancouver.
Rizzotti said that, if demand for the current phase is strong enough, the next phase of City Centre 5 could come online as quickly as nine months after the completion of City Centre 4.
The building’s wet lab space (which requires specialized plumbing and ventilation) will be filling a gap in the private sector that, she said, is much needed.
The area is looking to attract leading Canadian industry sectors and the wet lab space makes the district more attractive to the whole Lower Mainland as an asset, according to Rizzotti.
High profile organizations are starting to recognize the value in the area with the University of British Columbia (UBC) buying space in City Centre 1 for their Masters of Physical Therapy program for the South of Fraser region. This is in addition to their $70 million purchase in 2021 for a 135,000-square-foot property down the street which is anticipated to be a combination of residential and commercial space.
Rizzotti says that the presence of UBC is creating more interest from private and public sectors, as well as changing the dynamic in the area.
“That has certainly driven interest and really put it on everybody's radar that if UBC is investing so heavily into that community, they really do see a future in Surrey,” she said.
“There's been a lot of consideration and consultation underway around how we create an environment as a student-driven and business-driven campus.”
The City Centre 4 building will complete in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Lark Group.
