Read the headlines and the Lower Mainland looks like it's slowing down. Read the composition underneath them and something more specific is happening: roughly the same amount of ground needs clearing, spread across far more sites, each one smaller than it used to be.
That distinction matters if your work happens before the build rather than during it. A market with fifteen tower sites and a market with four hundred infill lots can produce similar volumes of demolition and hazardous material work — but they are bought differently, scheduled differently, and priced differently.
Here is what the numbers say as of this month.
Starts are down modestly. Condos are down hard.
Housing starts in the Vancouver census metropolitan area ran to 17,298 units over January through August 2026, against 18,405 for the same period in 2025 — down about 6%. That is a soft year, not a collapse.
The condo line is where it gets severe. CMHC reported condominium apartment starts in Metro Vancouver down roughly 40% in the first half of 2026, the weakest first half in about fifteen years. The reason is visible on the demand side: completed and unsold condo units across the Vancouver CMA sat at 4,376 in May 2026, up about 76% year over year, and roughly 80% of that overhang is concrete high-rise. Pre-construction sales across BC came in at 124 units in the first quarter of 2026. In the same quarter of 2021 the figure was in the thousands.
When presale revenue disappears, concrete towers stop penciling. Projects that would have cleared a city block are not starting.
What replaced them is smaller and more numerous
Purpose-built rental has taken over the volume. Rental now accounts for roughly 60% of Metro Vancouver starts, against under 20% a decade ago. Rental projects skew toward wood-frame mid-rise rather than concrete high-rise, which means smaller sites, shorter schedules, and more of them.
Underneath that, small-scale infill is adding a second, very different stream of work.
As of Surrey's July 2026 corporate report, the City had approved 465 SSMUH building permits producing 943 net new units — across roughly 72,000 eligible properties. That is under 1% uptake in about two years. The runway is enormous and almost entirely unbuilt.
The mix inside those permits is the part most people get wrong. Roughly 71% are duplexes and about 22% are garden or coach houses. Only around 7% are the four-to-six unit houseplexes the provincial legislation was aimed at.
For clearing work, a duplex replacement and a sixplex replacement involve nearly the same teardown. The structure coming down is one older house either way. So the practical demand is a high volume of single-lot residential demolitions — not a smaller number of large, complex sites.
Surrey's servicing changes land this month
Alongside the July 2026 review, Surrey endorsed a set of servicing requirement changes for SSMUH applications: frontage dedication and sidewalks on all applications, additional curb and boulevard works, water main and sanitary sewer upsizing on duplexes and houseplexes, and detention requirements above a stated impervious threshold. Adoption was anticipated for October 2026, with consultation through the fall and a staff report back in early 2027.
If you are pro forma-ing SSMUH lots in Surrey on numbers you built earlier this year, that is a line item worth re-checking directly with the City before you commit. The servicing exposure behind the change is substantial — the City's own estimate of the water and sewer upgrades implied by full SSMUH buildout runs into the hundreds of millions over several decades.
The infrastructure window has mostly moved on
Both major transit projects are past the stage that generates demolition and bulk excavation. The Broadway Subway reached full track installation in September 2026 and is slated to open in late 2027. Surrey–Langley SkyTrain guideway construction is roughly two thirds complete with the great majority of piles done, opening late 2029. The site-clearing work on those corridors is behind us.
What is ahead is utility and industrial. BC Hydro has a large multi-year capital program in Surrey involving several new and redeveloped substations with in-service dates around 2032 — which puts the civil and site-preparation packages in roughly the 2027 to 2030 window. Large industrial park development in South Surrey is also moving, with phased build-ready delivery underway.
What this means if you buy demolition
- Your counterparty changed. Fewer large developers with in-house project management, more small builders doing their first or second teardown. They need sequencing help as much as they need a crew.
- Volume beats size. Pricing a single lot as a one-off is expensive. Several lots scoped together spread mobilisation across the run instead of repeating it.
- The housing stock is the right age to find things. Infill targets older single-family neighbourhoods, which means pre-1990 construction, which means a survey finding regulated material is the expected result rather than the unlucky one.
- Contractor availability is the constraint, not demand. Many small jobs across many sites strain scheduling in a way a single large site does not.
Where Nexora fits
Nexora coordinates and manages the clearing stage — engaging and managing the qualified consultants who carry out hazardous materials surveys, the licensed contractors who perform any abatement those surveys trigger, and the independent clearance that lets the next trade start. Across one lot or a run of them.
In a market shaped like this one, the value is mostly in the scheduling: one party holding the sequence across several sites, rather than each site discovering its own problems on its own timeline.