Cannabis growers eager for Okanagan industrial space

The Okanagan is quickly becoming one of the country’s leading regions in cannabis production.

Kelowna’s Doja Cannabis has two separate production facilities totaling approximately 30,000 sq ft.

The company's 7,000 sq ft West Kelowna facility is one of the select few in B.C. to successfully complete Health Canada's pre-sales license inspection.

In October, the company officially purchased a 22,580 sq ft building along Highway 97 that will produce 5,000 kilograms of cannabis per year.

Located in the North Okanagan town of Lumby, cannabis company True Leaf recently broke ground on its “True Leaf Campus”, a 25,000 sq ft facility located on a 40-acre parcel of land that the company says will become “a hub for the development of the company’s medicinal cannabis products.”

Based in Lake Country, Valen’s Groworks owns 17, 000 sq ft of industrial space where it plans to produce up to 2,500 pounds of dried cannabis annually.

Watch KelownaNow's exclusive tour of the Valen's Groworks facility.

Cannabis company Sunnivia will likely build one of the largest cannabis production facilities in the country near Oliver this year.

The production facility is said to be a 700,000 sq ft greenhouse facility that will produce a hefty 25,000 kg of premium medical cannabis per year.

With legalization scheduled for August at the earliest, these sizeable production facilities are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

A recent report from Colliers International discovered that the Okanagan and Kelowna specifically has one of the lowest industrial vacancy rates in Canada.

“We’re getting an awful lot of inquiries from potential medicinal marijuana growers with the expectation that it soon won't just be medicinal but also a recreational industry,” said Eric Weber of Colliers International.

“There has been a really strong flurry of activity with companies buying industrial lots because they can’t find a big enough or appropriate building on the market."

According to Weber, well over ten large sized industrial lots have sold in the Kelowna area in the past year, all with intentions of becoming cannabis production facilities.

“Typically growers will just get a shell space and then inside they will build multiple little rooms which will be used to house plants at a variety of growth stages,” explained Weber.

"The buildings are huge electricity consumers with all the lights and fans so they require special electrical standards that follow the guidelines created by Health Canada."

However, just as demand is beginning to boom for medicinal and recreational cannabis vacancy rates in the Okanagan are plummeting.

In the Okanagan region, the industrial vacancy rate fell to 2.2% at the end of 2017 and in Kelowna specifically the industrial vacancy at the end of the year was 1.8%.

An industrial vacancy rate below 2.5% is tied for the lowest of sub-one million population markets compiled by Colliers, which included Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Waterloo and Halifax.

Developers and owners are responding to the high demand but have only been able to add about 120,000 sq. ft. of new inventory in the last six months, according to Colliers.

The majority of that space has already been spoken for as nearly half of those buildings were built for owner-users and were fully occupied the moment they were completed