Vancouver’s City Center Motel was reported to have been sold, closing in November

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Lower Mount Pleasant is booming, with gleaming new condo towers and tech buildings popping up everywhere you look.

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But one of its main properties has been an outlier: the City Center Motor Hotel .

Located on a full block between East 5th and 6th at 2111 Main St., the modest two-story, 76-room building is one of Vancouver’s weirdest landmarks, because it’s so out of place in the modern city – a cheap motel in a very expensive property.

But the city center seems to be finally changing hands. The front desk confirmed that the motel will close in November.

A call was not returned to the motel manager, but real estate sources say the site was sold to Nicola Wealth , a Vancouver real estate and asset management company that owns 180 properties throughout North America, including 40 on the Lower Continent. The purchase price is unknown, but it is believed to be around $ 60 million.

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In an email, a Nicola Wealth spokesperson said the company “cannot confirm the purchase of 2111 Main at this time.”

Developers have been snooping around the downtown site for decades, but the owner, Capital (Canada) Trading Company, stuck with the 1954 motel, which he bought for $ 2.8 million in September 1989.

Motel rates remain relatively low – $ 100 per night on various online booking sites. The City Center supplements its motel income by renting the site as a filming location: television series such as Batwoman, Once Upon a Time, Charmed and iZombie have been filmed there.

Still, the property is worth much more as a development site – its 2021 property appraisal is $ 36,958,000.

Interestingly, the assessment is down 25 percent since 2019, when it was assessed at $ 49,257,700. Property taxes for 2021 were $ 382,183.09, down from $ 389,906.29 in 2019 (BC Assessment did not respond to a question about why the City Center’s assessment dropped so low).

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The site is located in what the city calls the “Mount Pleasant Industrial Area,” which is zoned IC-2. A city spokesperson said that under existing zoning, new development could include “ manufacturing, warehousing, office, artist studio, retail (or) service “. If a new owner would like to change the area of ​​the property,” a mix of residential, office and retail uses is allowed, generally up to six stories would be considered. “

According to its website, Nicola Wealth manages $ 6.1 billion in assets, including more than $ 4 billion in real estate. Its real estate portfolio is diverse, including condominiums, industrial buildings, offices, and retail. The company has acquired $ 800 million in assets in the last 12 months.

Among its properties is The Lightworks Building at 22 East 5th, located a block and a half west of the downtown site. The six-story, 54,350-square-foot office has a ground-floor retail space built behind a 1940s art deco facade.

Nicola Wealth owns two more buildings in Lower Mount Pleasant, the four-story, 25,207-square-foot “office / industrial flex” building at 5th and Columbia and the two-story, 72,641-square-foot Nickel office building at 285 West 5th.

The immediate north neighbor of the City Center site is Main Alley, a five-building, 683,000-square-foot “collaborative campus” that Westbank is developing across four blocks.

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