Two instruments, and neither moved a whole site

Selling school land sounds like one kind of transaction. The two the Vancouver board completed in ten years were each narrower than that, and neither moved a whole site.

The two completed instruments.

The board and committee record for the ten years to 2026 contains two completed land instruments and no outright sale of a whole school site¹.

The first is the Lord Roberts Annex. The Board approved a set of agreements on 25 June 2018² and they were concluded by September 2018. Only the subsurface parcel was sold; the surface was retained and a replacement school stands on the site, so the site never left the enrolling inventory¹.

The second is the south portion of Sir Sandford Fleming, at 1401 to 1455 East 49th Avenue: a 99-year pre-paid ground lease to Vittori Developments Ltd. and Vittori Lanark Holdings Ltd. for about $8.5 million³, declared surplus on 25 May 2021 and reaching third reading of the by-law on 25 September 2024. The dates in that chain, and what the City’s file adds to them, were set out on 7 September⁴.

What each instrument moved, and what it left.

Both instruments left something with the board, and the two somethings are different in kind. At the Annex the board kept an estate in the land, the surface, and put a school back on it. At Fleming the board kept the title and a reversion, and gave up possession for a term longer than any planning horizon it publishes⁴.

Neither transferred a whole site in fee simple. The ten-year record contains no instrument that did¹.

Where the consideration in the ten-year record came from.

Adding the two published considerations gives a decade total of $81.5 million, or $83.5 million taking the upper limit on the Annex playfield element. The Annex agreements account for 89.6 to 89.8 per cent of that, and the Fleming lease for 10.2 to 10.4 per cent⁵.

So close to nine tenths of the land consideration in this ten-year record came from the transaction in which the district kept the surface, rebuilt the school on it, and continued to enrol students there.

That is an observation about two transactions in one district and no more than that. It supports no expectation about what any other structure would earn on any other site, because a consideration reflects the land, the market and the moment as much as the instrument.

The Annex consideration, in four parts.

The Annex agreements price four separate things: the subsurface parcel at $48.3 million⁶, statutory rights-of-way and covenants at $16.7 million, a five-year construction lease at $8.0 million, and playfield works at up to $2.0 million¹.

The three fixed elements total $73.0 million, and the playfield upper limit carries the range to $75.0 million⁷. Because one element is stated as a limit rather than an amount, the consideration on this transaction is a range in the records read and not a single figure.

The Fleming consideration, taken once.

The Fleming lease was pre-paid³, so the consideration was settled at the start of a 99-year term. Spread across the term, with no adjustment for discounting, inflation or the timing of the payment, it is about $85,900 a year⁸.

The City of Vancouver referral report, report date 2 September 2025, states that an estimated total of 87 units would be delivered through the application, at six storeys, with 20 per cent of residential floor area secured below market, on a site of 2,396.6 square metres, and names the landowner as the Board of Education of School District No. 39 (Vancouver)⁹. The below-market commitment is expressed as a share of residential floor area, so it does not convert to a number of units on the published record.

The statutory route each instrument had to take.

Ministerial Order M193/08, effective 3 September 2008, provides that a board “must not dispose of land or improvements by sale and transfer in fee simple or by way of a lease of 10 years or more unless such disposal is to another board or an independent school for educational purposes or is approved by the Minister”¹⁰. The same order allows a board to dispose by lease of less than ten years to an agency or organisation for an alternative community use.

On the face of the order, a sale of a parcel and a 99-year lease both fall on the approval side of that line, and the five-year construction lease at the Annex falls under the ten-year threshold on its stated term. The Ministry’s policy page states that “only in exceptional circumstances should a board consider permanently disposing of school property”, and that property sold for non-educational and non-community use must go to public tender or another competitive bidding process¹¹.

The approvals themselves are not in the records read for this piece, and they stand below as an open gate. Until they are read, the routing above describes what the order requires rather than what was done.

One instrument predates the policy, the other sits inside it.

Policy 20, Disposal of Land or Improvements, was adopted on 24 September 2018 and amended on 27 September 2021¹². The Board approved the Annex agreements on 25 June 2018², three months before the policy was adopted, so that transaction was not made under it¹.

The Fleming instrument ran entirely inside the policy period, and its published sequence follows the policy’s order: a surplus declaration on 25 May 2021, then an accepted offer, then a by-law¹¹².

Policy 20 also records Board commitments made in 2015 and 2021 to preserve neighbourhood school sites and to decline disposals that decrease public asset value, with exceptions for partnerships with public entities or First Nations and for approved land swaps and leases¹². Both completed instruments retained an interest in the land. The records read do not state whether those commitments were applied to either transaction.

What the comparison establishes, and what it leaves open.

It establishes that two completed instruments exist in the ten-year record, that each retained a different kind of interest for the board, that the published considerations are $73 million to $75 million and about $8.5 million³, and that close to nine tenths of the decade’s land consideration came from the transaction that kept the school on the site.

It does not establish that either instrument was well or badly priced, because a price requires a valuation and no appraisal is in the records read. It does not rank the two structures, because they were made for different sites in different years under different rules. And it does not close the question of what else may have moved, because no consolidated register of school land transactions was located to check a records search against.

Four fields on every completed transaction, published in one place.

Four fields on every completed transaction, published in one place: which estate was transferred, which estate was retained, the parcel area of each, and whether the site remained in enrolling use on the day after closing.

Every figure in this piece already exists in a public document. The four fields would let a reader assemble them without first reading eight years of minutes, and would make the difference between the two structures visible at a glance rather than after a records search.

Such a record would inform and coordinate. It would decide nothing, rank nothing and allocate nothing. Deciding is the Board’s work and the Minister’s. Knowing what has already been done is everyone’s.

The questions this piece leaves open are set out in Sources.¹³