Drivers, make sure your gas tank is full before you get caught in gridlock on your way to the Lions Gate Bridge.
The Chevron station on West Georgia has been sold to Vancouver’s Anthem Properties. Chevron closed the station on March 29, two days before Anthem officially took over ownership of the prime Coal Harbour property.
It was one of only two gas stations in downtown Vancouver — the island of land in between all the bridges — that offered a convenient place to gas up, especially for vehicles with diesel engines.
Mehdi Shokri of Avison Young Real Estate says the other downtown gas station may soon be hanging up its pumps, too.
The Esso station at Davie and Burrard is on the market and “it will sell for sure,” he says.
When the City of Vancouver allowed for more density in the West End, real estate developers took note. “It created a lot of value [in land prices] for developers,” Shokri says. The two gas stations are “in very strategic locations and landed on a good piece of real estate now that the land use has changed.”
Chevron spokesperson Adrien Byrne said that last year several upgrades were made to the station, including the addition of diesel, but “given the rapid increase in real estate prices we took a different course of action.
In 2016, the B.C. Assessment for the Georgia Street Chevron was $10.2 million. This year it’s $32.8 million.
The West End/Coal Harbour Community Plan allows for a 385’ residential tower on the property. That’s a roughly 35-storey building.
Shokri says Anthem Properties “is probably one of the most active developers in the past 12 months.”
It bought a couple of properties in Coquitlam as well as “numerous” properties on the North Shore. In late 2016 it bought the Grandview Properties Park at Boundary and Grandview. The property includes Walmart, Vancouver Film Studios and another Chevron gas station.
Anthem is currently marketing its five-tower Station Square development in Burnaby.
Details are not yet available about plans for the Chevron land.
Chevron put three of its Vancouver gas stations up for sale last August: the one at Georgia and Bidwell; the one on West 39th and Dunbar, which sold and closed in February; and a commercial truck filling station on Clark Drive at East 1st, which closed late last year and is still being marketed. "These particular locations have a higher and greater land-use potential greater to their current locations," it said in a press release quoted in Business in Vancouver. It still has 22 locations in Vancouver.
