‘A disaster’: Surrey buyers fuming after developer cancels contracts

Harjit Bhasin still remembers the moment he passed the site for the Creekside Terrace townhouse development.

Located on the former Surrey Public Market site at 6388 King George Blvd., it was advertised by Ansu Development as 76 townhouse units offering “West Vancouver-style living.”

Bhasin lived near the development site and that’s when he started dreaming about purchasing a unit for his son to eventually move into when it was completed.

“I went right in and decided to put down a deposit,” said Bhasin, a chartered professional accountant.

The first deposit was $50,000 and estimated value of the townhouse unit was about $500,000, Bhasin said.

That was in 2017.

Today, that dream for his son has become something of a nightmare.

“It’s just a disaster,” Bhasin told the Surrey Citizen in an interview.

Last week, Bhasin and a group of others who had put down deposits received a letter from the lawyer representing the developer saying that their contracts had been cancelled. The buyers also received cheques in the amount of their deposits, without any interest added.

Bhasin’s total deposit was $75,000, as he had to invest another $25,000 in 2021 following years of delays in construction of the Creekside Terrace development.

“Everybody got the cheques on the same day,” Bhasin said. “This seems to have been in the works for months, but I spoke to someone about the project the previous week and there was no mention of any problems.”

Bhasin was part of a group of 10 people he knew and had told about the project who decided to invest in it. All of the buyers group are now looking for a lawyer for a possible class-action lawsuit.

In the meantime, Bhasin is not cashing his cheque just yet because he is unsure what doing that would mean for a potential legal action.

The group managed to meet privately with the developer last week and were told, Bhasin said, that the money that was owed on the project is more than what could be realized based on the original selling prices of the units. And so the contracts were cancelled so the units can be sold for today’s prices. The developer has declined to comment publicly about the situation.

Bhasin questions that logic considering the real estate market in Metro Vancouver is in a downtown, with units languishing and prices falling.

“Why didn’t they tell us this months ago,” Bhasin said. “Why suddenly now?”

Bhasin said he missed out on a different real estate opportunity that could have netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars – all because his money was tied up in Creekside all these years.

“If we hadn’t put out money in here, we could have invested that elsewhere,” Bhasin said.