William Wright Commercial Enters Central Island Commercial Real Estate Market

William Wright Commercial Real Estate Services is coming to central Vancouver Island in Q1 2023.

The commercial real estate firm’s seventh office, and second on the Island, will be at 100B-154 Memorial Avenue in the Parksville Professional Centre, and will be overseen by Connor Braid, Managing Director for Vancouver Island, and their team of agents will be announced in Q1 2023.

“We’ve invested lots of money for clients in the Central Island market over the past few years, and we’re big believer in the area,” says Cory Wright, Managing Director, BC, who founded the firm 10 years ago. “The Western Investor has identified Nanaimo as one of the top 5 places to invest in BC, and we think the Central Island will be a strong real estate market for years to come. We’re steering a lot of people in this direction.”

William Wright Commercial’s other offices are in Victoria, Kelowna, New Westminster, Langley and two in Vancouver, with a new Kamloops office set to open in 2023.

“I founded the company 10 years ago and I still run it as president on a day to day basis,” he adds. “Our team is approaching 60 province-wide, and we’ll be announcing our Central Island team in Q1 2023. Our thought pattern is to have smaller team-like offices in more markets. Traditionally, real estate is more of a ‘lone-wolf’ type office, but we believe in a more collaborative approach.”
William Wright Commercial delivers commercial real estate services for landlords, tenants, investors, and developers, as well as self-storage and property management.

Wright states the company will have conducted $1.7 billion in transactions throughout the province in 2022.

The key to William Wright Commercial’s success is its laser-focus on customer service, something Wright himself learned the value of during his time in the hospitality industry prior to starting the company.

“One thing that will give us a competitive advantage heading into the Central Island is our customer-service first mentality,” he believes. “We’ve made a lot of headway in Kelowna and Victoria with that mentality, and we’re working with some of the largest clients in those markets. We will take that same approach in the Central Island office and we expect the same results.”

While in the hospitality industry, he became commercial landlords through the business and his dealings with agents made him feel like “there had to be a better way. We felt the customer service level was quite low”, and made decisive steps to change that when he decided to enter the real estate business.

After 18 months in a Lower Mainland residential brokerage, William Wright Commercial started in a 200 square foot office in Yaletown with literally no windows. It was always the end goal to get into the brokerage business.

Besides being bullish on the Central Island market – he expects it to become one of their top offices in short order – Wright notes that the company will expand into Calgary in 2024.

“Calgary has land upon which you can build, build, build,” he observes. “Calgary has been turning office spaces into hotels, multi-family residential, trying to re-invent itself. Their office market is a good indication – looking at the vacancy rate of A Class property, it’s 7-8 per cent. That has meant that Class B renters could get into Class A units for Class B prices. That’s changing.”

“Industrial land in the Lower Mainland is going for between $4 and $9 million per acre,” he adds. “An acre on the outskirts of Calgary is $800,000 plus right now. You can see the attraction for industrial landowners and end users.”

Written by Mark MacDonald for Business Examiner.