University District

University District is built on University of Calgary land — 200 acres of the west campus. The land still belongs to the university, and homes here are sold on a long lease rather than freehold, with the university keeping the title. That is the first thing to understand before buying here. The terms sit in the documents and they are specific to each building, so it is a question to ask early and in writing, rather than one to take an answer on in a show suite.

Nothing here is old. 77% of the homes were built between 2016 and 2021, the first residents moved in during July 2018, and the community is still being built out. 59% are apartments and 21% are row homes. 28% of households own where they live and the rest rent. The Calgary Real Estate Board publishes apartment figures for University District and no separate benchmark for row homes, so the panel above covers apartments only.

What you get for that is everything inside a walk. More than fifty shops and services along the retail main street, a grocery store, a cinema, and three hours of free parking underneath it. Forty acres of green space, twelve kilometres of pathway and four parks — Central Commons runs an outdoor rink from December to late March and a splash pad through the summer, and the playground at Northwest Commons was Calgary’s first national demonstration site for inclusive play, with ramps, accessible swings and a poured surface instead of gravel. Alberta Children’s Hospital and Foothills Medical Centre are both on the doorstep and the university is across the road. There is no school inside the community, and no community association yet.

So the questions here aren’t the ones an older bungalow asks. They are about the building — how much is set aside for the big repairs and whether it is enough, which is what a reserve fund study tells you; what is still covered by new home warranty; what the board has decided about renting a unit out; and what the lease on the land actually says. Every one of those is answerable, and the answers sit in documents rather than in anybody’s opinion. New build condominiums are a different discipline from the older detached homes a lot of my work is in, and I would rather say so than talk past it — what you will get from me here is those documents read properly, the numbers explained, and a straight answer where I would want to check something first.