What does land cost on Bowen Island in 2026?
Bowen Island had 39 vacant-land listings on September 4, 2026, asking $399,000 to $2,299,000. Serviced lots with water, hydro and a municipal road at the line sit in the middle of that: Arbutus Ridge asks $545,000 to $999,000 plus GST for four lots of 0.49 to 1.01 acres.
What is the Bowen Island market doing?
Start with houses, because that is the number everyone quotes. Greater Vancouver REALTORS put the MLS benchmark price for a detached home on Bowen Island at $1,389,700 in August 2026, with a median selling price of $1,522,500 across nine sales and 13 detached homes listed for sale (Greater Vancouver REALTORS monthly statistics package, August 2026). For scale, the board's composite benchmark for all residential property types across Metro Vancouver was $1,081,900 in the same month.
Nine sales in a month is a thin market. It moves in steps rather than trends, and one unusual sale can shift a monthly median by six figures. Treat any single month's figure as a reading, not a valuation.
What are Bowen Island building lots listed at?
Land is a separate and even thinner market. The table below is every Bowen Island building lot with a confirmed MLS number that was showing as listed on September 4, 2026 (buyonbowen.com, as of September 4, 2026; lot sizes cross-checked against the MLS records catalogued in our own competitor review of the same date). These are asking prices, not sold prices. No public source of sold bare-land prices exists on Bowen — ask a REALTOR for a sold-comparables run before you rely on any of these numbers.
| Address | Asking price | Size | MLS # |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1080 Foxglove Lane | $399,000 | 2,300 sq ft (0.05 ac) | R3156298 |
| 1084 Foxglove Lane | $399,000 | 2,300 sq ft (0.05 ac) | R3156292 |
| Lot 8, 762 Hayes Road (Arbutus Ridge) | $545,000 | 21,528 sq ft (0.49 acres) | R3149995 |
| 857 Forster Lane (The Lakelands) | $565,000 | 14,810 sq ft (0.34 ac) | R3127214 |
| 750 Taylor Road | $629,000 | 67,779 sq ft (1.56 ac) | R3153141 |
| 931 Fairway Lane | $630,000 | 7,405 sq ft (0.17 ac) | R3137593 |
| 393 Creek Road | $699,000 | 108,726 sq ft (2.50 ac) | R3137768 |
| 747 Seymour Bay Drive | $800,000 | 7,841 sq ft (0.18 ac) | R3149204 |
| 791 Seymour Bay Drive | $840,000 | 7,405 sq ft (0.17 ac) | R3149201 |
| 822 McIntosh Lane | $850,000 | 44,867 sq ft (1.03 ac) | R3145792 |
| 831 Windjammer Road | $879,000 | 65,912 sq ft (1.51 ac) | R3144888 |
| 2070 Cape Drive | $1,425,000 | Not published | R3125140 |
| 251 Jason Road | $1,498,000 | 43,995 sq ft (1.01 ac) | R3144020 |
| 923 Ocean Park Lane | $2,299,000 | 50,198 sq ft (1.15 ac) | R3160305 |
Two patterns are worth naming. Small does not mean cheap: the 0.17-acre lots on Fairway Lane and Seymour Bay Drive are priced at or above acre-sized parcels elsewhere on the island, because they sit inside serviced subdivisions with the work already done. And the very cheapest listings are the ones that carry the most unpriced work: a well, a septic design and approval, a hydro extension, a driveway.
What do the other Bowen Island developments ask?
| Development or lot | Asking | What is on offer | Source, as of 2026-09-04 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbutus Ridge (Hayes Road, west side) | $545,000 to $999,000 plus GST | Four serviced lots of 0.49 to 1.01 acres; municipal water, hydro and telecom at the lot line, dedicated public road, registered design guidelines | lots.json, this site |
| The Lakelands (near Grafton Lake) | Lot 5 at $675,000 | Two home sites left of eleven, next to a nature reserve; described as cleared and serviced with utilities, road access and municipal water. Note that the development's own Lot 5 price and the MLS listing at 857 Forster Lane in the same subdivision, at $565,000, do not agree — ask which is current | thelakelandsbowen.com |
| Seymour Bay Drive (Cowan Point, south end) | $850,000 to $2,560,000 plus GST | Four of ten properties remaining, but most of that range is finished houses rather than bare land; the two bare lots on MLS are $800,000 and $840,000 | bowenislandproperties.ca |
| 831 Windjammer Road (single lot, next door) | $879,000 | 1.51 acres, municipal water with connections at the build site, 400-amp underground service, driveway already built | MLS R3144888, One Percent Realty |
| 786 Hayes Road (private resale inside Arbutus Ridge) | $625,000 | 1.00 acre, shared septic field with the connection at the lot line, listed December 2025 and still available | MLS R3074402, Macdonald Realty |
786 Hayes Road deserves a straight answer rather than silence. It is an owner resale of an earlier-phase lot inside our own name, an acre for $625,000, and a buyer comparing acre for acre will see it against Lot 5 at $999,000. The differences are real: a resale is a private sale rather than a new lot sold under a disclosure statement, the servicing and the septic arrangement are not the same, and it has been on the market since December 2025 without selling. Look at both. Ask both sellers the same questions.
Price per acre, and why it is a blunt tool
Per-acre pricing is how raw land trades, but you build one house on a building lot whatever its size, so a half-acre serviced lot will always look expensive per acre and a rocky two-acre parcel will always look cheap. Figures below are rounded to the nearest ten thousand dollars and derived from the asking prices and sizes above.
| Lot | Asking | Acres | Per acre | Serviced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 750 Taylor Road | $629,000 | 1.56 | $400,000 | Not stated |
| 831 Windjammer Road | $879,000 | 1.51 | $580,000 | Yes |
| 786 Hayes Road (resale) | $625,000 | 1.00 | $630,000 | Shared septic at lot line |
| 822 McIntosh Lane | $850,000 | 1.03 | $830,000 | Not stated |
| Arbutus Ridge Lot 5 | $999,000 | 1.01 | $990,000 | Yes |
| The Lakelands Lot 5 | $675,000 | 0.65 | $1,040,000 | Yes |
| Arbutus Ridge Lot 8 | $545,000 | 0.49 | $1,110,000 | Yes |
| Arbutus Ridge Lot 6 | $999,000 | 0.89 | $1,120,000 | Yes |
| Arbutus Ridge Lot 7 | $699,000 | 0.49 | $1,430,000 | Yes |
Read the column as a sanity check, not a verdict. The useful comparison is total cost to a finished house on a lot you can actually build on in the time you have.
What does serviced actually add?
At Arbutus Ridge the developer has already built the road to municipal standard and dedicated it as a public road, brought municipal water from the King Edward Bay system to each lot line with fire hydrants installed, ducted BC Hydro and telecom underground to the lot line, and installed the shared septic field on Lot 10 for the lots that use it. What a buyer still pays on the servicing side is short and known:
- $1,500 municipal water connection fee, payable before the building permit is issued.
- $3,500 design review fee, payable on completion, for the review of your plans against the Design Guidelines.
- On-lot works from the connection point: your service trench, your septic installation if your lot has an on-lot field, your driveway under a Driveway Access Permit.
What you do not pay for is the part that has no price until someone designs it. There is no well to drill, because the water is municipal. There is no hydro extension, because the duct is already at the lot line. There is no road to build. On an unserviced parcel each of those is a separate contract, a separate approval and a separate schedule, and none of them can be quoted from a listing photograph.
Natural gas is not available anywhere in the development; the Disclosure Statement records it as not applicable. Plan for electric heat, a heat pump or propane.
What to do next
Walk the lots and compare them against the listings in the table above on the same afternoon. Tours take about two hours including the ferry, by appointment, and we send the Disclosure Statement and the site plan the same day.
This is not an offer for sale. Any such offering may only be made with a disclosure statement. E.&O.E.