West Vancouver

West Vancouver

West Vancouver isn’t a town, it’s a lifestyle destination. It’s where people with serious money come for the whole package: oceanfront living, ski slopes on your doorstep, and a polished, tranquil community just a bridge away from downtown. The culture here, with events like the Harmony Arts Festival, is geared toward a certain kind of buyer. The real estate market is a direct result of this pull. With a median household income over $104,000 and more than half of all homes being single-detached houses, this is a market built on established wealth.

The numbers tell a story of stability. The median age is over 50, and seniors make up nearly 30% of the population. This isn’t a place for speculators; it’s where people settle for the long haul. It’s also incredibly well-educated—over 60% of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The economy isn’t based on a single volatile industry; it’s driven by a deep bench of professionals in tech, science, and finance, with that sector alone accounting for nearly 18% of all jobs. The geography itself—hemmed in by mountains and ocean—prevents sprawl and keeps resale demand exceptionally high. For a certain type of borrower, this is the absolute peak of BC living.

For us, however, it’s a non-starter. Let’s be blunt: our maximum LTV in West Vancouver is 0.0%.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the real estate and everything to do with our business model. Tekamar was built from the ground up to serve the rest of British Columbia—the markets well outside the Lower Mainland. Our tagline is “the MIC for towns without stoplights,” and West Vancouver is the polar opposite of that. Our entire system—from underwriting to risk assessment to recovery models—is built for places like the Okanagan, the Kootenays, and northern Vancouver Island.

Lending in Metro Vancouver is a different game entirely. The foreclosure timelines, the legal costs, and the sheer amount of capital needed for even a low-LTV loan are outside our mandate. Our funds are raised from friends, family, and our local community; our first job is to protect that principal. We do that by sticking to the communities we know and avoiding massive risk concentration in any one place. A single default on a West Vancouver property could tie up the same capital as five or six of our typical files in the Interior. That’s a risk profile we simply aren’t built to handle.

So while West Vancouver is an undeniably stable, high-value market, it’s not our turf. If you have a file for a waterfront home in Ambleside or a cabin near Horseshoe Bay, we’ll have to pass. But if your client needs a bridge loan in Vernon, a second mortgage in Courtenay, or an equity takeout in Castlegar, you’re talking our language. That’s the core of what we do.