I just picked up the Richmond Review, a local newspaper for our city, and read that Aberdeen Square is 90% sold after only 9 days (it sold 75% of units on the opening weekend).  That's 160,000sq ft of space split into 6 floors snatched up as quickly as I've ever seen any development in the Vancouver area.

The building is an extension to the already existing Aberdeen Center, an "Asian" mall, and is situated right within meters of the  Canada Line station.  We were considering this location for our office and took a look at initial plans and the building models back a few months ago.  The price was steep however, initial estimates were for  $500+/sq ft for office units with windows, though later we were told that the price per sq. ft would start at $295 (presumably for less desirable retail or office space).

Other details include: 1 parking pass for tenants with 1 unit, with no option to get more.  Limited and unknown visitor parking.  Parking spots are first come first serve, so no reserved spots and all parking will be "rooftop" parking, adjacent to the existing rooftop Aberdeen parking.  To get to this parking you have to drive up 4-5 parkade levels through the already congested Aberdeen Center parking.  This means that not only is the parking hard to get to, you are not guaranteed to find a spot easily once you're up there.

Overall the sales appears to be an overall success, though the paper does report only 30% of the buyers know what they'll do with the space, with the rest being investors or thinking about starting up a business.  With residential real estate hitting some sales challenges, an uncertain economic outlook in Canada and BC in general, and a still high unemployment rate, I wonder just how those investments will turn out, but this is a very interesting building and I look forward to seeing how it turns out.


Source: Richmond Review