BURST
A $763 million low-interest loan from the federal government will finance construction of two large rental towers and make the development of three city blocks in Burnaby more viable, the developer says.
Construction on the first phase of Grosvenor’s Brentwood Block project, across from the Brentwood shopping mall and the Brentwood Town Centre SkyTrain station, is underway. It will include a 41-storey condo tower, a community centre, commercial space, and these two rental towers.
The rental towers, to be built with the loan, will contain almost 1,300 residences. One of the towers at 60 storeys will be the tallest all-rental building in western Canada.
The loan to Grosvenor is from the federal government’s $55 billion apartment-construction loan program, which was established to encourage the building of 131,000 new rental homes by 2032. At June 2025, it has offered $24.9 billion in loans to build 63,500 rental units.
“Market conditions are not fantastic right now for development in Metro Vancouver,” said Steve O’Connell, CEO of Grosvenor’s North American property business. “But having tools like this loan product that we are using today and also having the ability to take a long-term view of Metro Vancouver, and knowing that it will come back to what we all recognize in Metro Vancouver, that’s what gives us the confidence to go forward with projects at this scale.”
The interest rate was not disclosed, but the loan’s 10-year term will help Grosvenor through construction and beyond to when it rents out the apartments and stabilizes income from tenants, said Marc Josephson, senior vice-president of development for Grosvenor.
“Anything that increases the certainty and stability of the environment around us, be it from a public policy perspective, from an interest rate perspective, from a trajectory of costs and revenue (perspective) — all of those things are essential in our industry for us to make these long-term decisions about major investments in housing.”
Grosvenor and its partners are putting $283.4 million of their own into the Brentwood Block development , including land and cash.
The apartment-construction loan program is one of several programs under Ottawa’s national housing strategy. It allows for developers to qualify for loans to cover up to 100 per cent of the cost for residential space. Projects must have at least five rental units and loan sizes can be as small as $1 million.
For a period of 10 years, at least 20 per cent of units must have rents at or below 30 per cent of the median total income of all families in the area or rents have to be established as part of an affordable housing program that provides support.
There may be some flexibility, but the CMHC generally requires borrowers in the apartment-construction loan program to have a minimum net worth that is equal to at least 25 per cent of the loan amount being requested, with a minimum of $100,000.
The largest loan under the apartment-construction loan program was $1.4 billion in 2022 to create nearly 3,000 rental homes for the Sen̓áḵw development in partnership with the Squamish Nation.
Grosvenor is a well-capitalized London-based company, founded in 1677 when it started buying some of the most expensive real estate in that city’s Mayfair and Belgravia areas, which it still owns.
It now manages investments for the 7th Duke of Westminster, one of the world’s wealthiest people under the age of 40 based on land, property and other assets. The company has been operating in North America since 1952 when it bought Annacis Island in Delta.