Richmond

Let’s be blunt: Richmond is a huge market, but it’s not our market. It’s a core piece of Metro Vancouver, and that puts it squarely outside our lending sandbox. This is a dense, urban island that moves to Vancouver’s rhythm, not ours. We’re set up for the rest of BC—the smaller cities and towns where knowing the community beats being near an international airport.

You can’t talk about Richmond without talking about its place as one of North America’s biggest hubs for East Asian culture. This isn’t just a census stat; it defines the city, from the shops in the Golden Village to its official planning documents. With over 200,000 people packed into the city—at a density of more than 1,600 per square kilometre—the whole place runs at a different speed. The housing market shows it. Single-detached houses make up only 30% of the stock, far outnumbered by a dense mix of low-rise apartments, row houses, and duplexes. For a lender, this type of high-density, strata-heavy market introduces layers of complexity in valuation and recovery that don’t exist in our core markets. The scale and pace here simply demand a completely different operational model.

The economics are another reason we stay away. A 10.8% unemployment rate is a significant flag, pointing to a big-city market with big-city volatility. It just doesn’t fit the profile of the lifestyle or resource towns we focus on, where local employment is often more stable and easier to underwrite. Our entire lending model is built for smaller, more predictable markets where we understand foreclosure timelines and can accurately project recovery values. The legal and real estate environment in Metro Vancouver is a different beast entirely. We’re talking about a system with different timelines, more complexity in court proceedings, and a scale that requires dedicated local teams just to keep up. We’re not set up to navigate that.

Look, our investors are our friends and family. Our number one job is protecting their capital. That means we stick to the markets we know inside and out—from Victoria and the Okanagan to the small towns in the Kootenays and the North. Richmond is prime territory for A-lenders and the big private firms built for the Lower Mainland. That’s not us, and we have no interest in trying to be.

That’s why our maximum loan-to-value in Richmond is 0.0%. If you’ve got a deal in Kelowna, Kamloops, Prince George, or some town the mapmakers almost forgot, we want to hear about it. For anything in Richmond, you’ll need to call someone else.