Squamish

Why We Pass on Squamish

Squamish isn’t the gritty mill town where you stop for gas on the way to Whistler anymore. Over the last decade, it completed its transition from a blue-collar forestry and rail hub into an expensive, highly sought-after bedroom community. The numbers tell the story clearly. The population has surged to 23,819, representing a massive 22.2% growth rate since 2016. High-earning families and remote tech workers have cashed out of the Lower Mainland to get closer to the mountains, dragging Vancouver-style pricing and bidding wars right up the Sea-to-Sky Highway.

The local demographics show exactly who is buying up the real estate. The median age is a youthful 37 years, and the workforce is highly educated, with 72.9% holding a post-secondary credential and 40.9% carrying a bachelor’s degree or higher. This isn’t a sleepy retirement town. Local household incomes are strong, with a median of $111,000. While the local port and rail lines still support industrial jobs, the primary employment drivers now are professional services, construction, and retail.

The town has a highly active workforce, boasting a 71.7% employment rate. Interestingly, 47.9% of residents enjoy a commute of under 15 minutes, but the average commute time sits at 27.4 minutes. That gap is explained by the segment of the population still making the daily grind down Highway 99 to North Vancouver or up to Whistler, while the remote work crowd stays in town to ride or climb before logging in.

From a development perspective, Squamish is physically boxed in. The community is confined to a land area of just 104.71 square kilometers, with a population density of 227.5 people per square kilometer. Squeezed tight between Howe Sound, sheer granite cliffs, and high-risk floodplains, there is very little buildable land left. This geographical bottleneck has changed the housing mix. Single-detached homes make up just 40.6% of the market. The rest of the inventory has shifted heavily toward higher density: apartments under five storeys represent 18.1%, row houses account for 14.6%, and duplexes make up 6.6%.

Squamish behaves like an extension of the Vancouver and Whistler markets. It carries the exact same high prices, leverage risks, and market volatility.

This direct correlation to Vancouver’s real estate bubble is precisely why Tekamar does not lend here. As a Salmon Arm-based mortgage investment corporation, we protect our investor capital by strictly avoiding Greater Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and their immediate commuter pockets. We focus our lending on stable, secondary markets, regional hubs, and smaller interior towns. Because Squamish is economically tied to the Lower Mainland, our maximum LTV for this community is 0%.

It is a spectacular, high-demand market with a 10/10 desirability score, but it does not fit our conservative lending model. If you have clients buying waterfront condos or pulling equity out of a home in Garibaldi Highlands, they will need a Vancouver-based lender. Save your deals for us when your clients are purchasing in the Okanagan, the Kootenays, or on Vancouver Island.