On July 13, 2026, Surrey council authorized staff to begin a neighbourhood concept plan for Grandview Heights Area 5. If you own land between 20 Avenue and 28 Avenue, east of 164 and 168 Street and west of 176 Street, your property is inside it. That is 292 hectares, or 722 acres, and the last unplanned piece of the Grandview Heights General Land Use Plan council approved in June 2005. Everything below comes from the city's corporate reports R144 of 2026 and R215 of 2024.
What council actually approved
Not a land use plan. Council authorized staff to start writing one. Nothing about density, lot size, parks or where the roads go has been decided, and no draft has been published.
The process runs in two stages. Stage 1 covers the vision: land uses and densities, environmental protection, school locations, parks and open space, and the road network. Engagement on it was to begin near the end of 2026, with a draft land use plan anticipated at council in the first quarter of 2027. Stage 2 covers servicing and infrastructure financing, and the final land use plan is anticipated in the spring of 2028. Anticipated is the city's word.
The paragraph that matters if you were planning to develop
R144 recommends that staff hold new development applications within the plan area at third reading until council approves a Stage 1 land use plan, then bring them forward for final reading once council endorses Stage 2. Applications can still be submitted and processed alongside the plan. They stop short of the finish line.
On the city's own anticipated dates, that means no third reading before sometime after the first quarter of 2027, and no final approval before sometime after spring 2028. If the plan was to rezone a Grandview Heights acre in the next eighteen months, that is the paragraph to read twice.
How long these have actually taken
Darts Hill is the useful comparison, the most recent one and immediately south. The city received a petition in January 2016. Council authorized the planning process on July 25, 2016. Stage 1 was approved on July 22, 2019, three years after that. The final NCP was approved on May 10, 2021. Initiation to finished plan took four years and ten months.
Area 5's published schedule is faster: about six months to the start of engagement, a year and a half to a draft plan, under two years to a final plan. It may hold. The Darts Hill record is the reason to plan around something longer.
Five Grandview Heights NCPs were finished before this one: Morgan Heights in 2005, Sunnyside Heights in 2010, Orchard Grove in 2011, Redwood Heights in 2020 and Darts Hill in 2021. As of November 2024 the city called Morgan Heights almost complete, Sunnyside Heights and Orchard Grove under development, and Redwood Heights and Darts Hill pending servicing. An approved plan is not a serviced lot, and in two of those five the gap has run years.
Servicing is the real gate
Area 5 cannot be built on its own pipes. It will rely on servicing running through the North Grandview, Redwood Heights and Darts Hill plan areas. Sanitary flow from Area 5 goes into the North Grandview and Darts Hill systems, then northwest to the Metro Vancouver trunk sewer at Croydon Drive and 32 Avenue. The water system now serving the neighbourhood is small and needs upgrades, including feeder mains already planned for Darts Hill and Redwood Heights. Drainage infrastructure is limited, so a comprehensive drainage management plan will be required.
That chain has moved, which is the most encouraging thing in the file. In November 2024 the city wrote that the Redwood Heights and Darts Hill servicing Area 5 depends on had not begun construction. By July 2026 the Darts Hill trunk sewer was nearing construction completion, and the pump station and forcemain for Redwoods and Area 5 were designed with land secured for the pump station.
What the environmental work found
Dillon Consulting completed a baseline ecological study in the winter of 2026. It identified eight Class B watercourses, five wetlands and several lower sensitivity drainage features, plus high value terrestrial habitat including trees showing Pileated Woodpecker activity, which confirms breeding habitat. Several of those areas line up with the Green Infrastructure Network in Surrey's Biodiversity Conservation Strategy.
Two consequences. Those features will shape where density and roads can go, so the draft plan will not treat all 722 acres the same. And site specific assessments by a qualified environmental professional may be required at the development stage, so a watercourse or a wet corner on your lot is a cost to carry in any projection.
Only about half the neighbourhood asked for this
Surrey's official community plan, bylaw 18020, sets the support test for starting a new neighbourhood plan: generally 50 per cent or more of the landowners, or 70 per cent or more of the owners of the land area. In 2022 the city contacted 419 private properties in Area 5. Of those, 229, recorded as 55 per cent of respondents and representing 57 per cent of the land area, supported starting the plan. So it cleared the landowner count test and came nowhere near the land area test. Three private landowner petitions had come in beforehand. Consultation on a plan a little over half the owners asked for tends to run longer than one everybody wanted.
What you can do with the lot in the meantime
The provincial small scale multi unit housing rules are the first thing owners ask about, and for most of this area the answer is less than people expect. Surrey adopted its zoning changes on July 8, 2024. They apply to eligible residential lots under 4,050 square metres inside the Metro Vancouver urban containment boundary: three units on a lot under 280 square metres, four units above that, and up to six on a lot of at least 281 square metres within 400 metres of a prescribed frequent bus stop with fifteen minute service.
An acre is 4,047 square metres, so a nominal one acre lot sits inside that size test by three square metres and anything larger sits outside it. The test that usually decides it here is the other one: properties not connected to community water and sewer may be exempt, and the city describes this neighbourhood's water system as small and its drainage infrastructure as limited. Existing section 219 covenants also still apply and take precedence. Confirm your own parcel with the city. Council also approved a comprehensive review of these rules on July 27, 2026, so they are not settled.
What it does to value, and what it does not
This part is judgment, not data. A plan initiation is not a rezoning and not a density allocation. It is the city agreeing to spend two years deciding what the area becomes, with applications held at third reading while it does.
The resale market underneath that is slow. In September 2026 the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board reported 60 detached sales in South Surrey and White Rock against 600 active listings, a sales to active listings ratio of 10 per cent, below the 12 to 20 per cent the board's release puts a balanced market at. The detached benchmark was $1.613M, down 7.4 per cent from a year earlier, with a median sale of $1.628M. So an owner choosing between selling now and waiting for the plan is weighing a soft resale market today against a planning file that produces nothing decisive until 2027 at the earliest.
If you own in Area 5, two things are worth doing now: read the Stage 1 engagement material when it comes out, and find out what the parcel is worth as it stands, before any plan. I can run the second one against comparables and current listings in your blocks, starting from a South Surrey home value estimate. The South Surrey and White Rock market update for September 2026 has the full set of figures, the area pages cover buying and selling in Grandview Heights and South Surrey real estate, and the Brookswood-Fernridge Community Plan post covers the same question on the Langley side, where the plan is already finished.
Sources
Boundaries, area, stages, timeline, the third reading hold, the environmental findings and the servicing description from City of Surrey Corporate Report R144, July 13, 2026. The landowner support test, the 2022 survey, the NCP completion record and the November 2024 servicing status from Corporate Report R215, November 4, 2024. General land use plan date and area, and the Darts Hill dates, from the city's pages for each. Small scale multi unit housing rules from the city's zoning page. Sales, listings and prices from the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board's September 2026 statistics package, released October 5, 2026, with the ratio calculated from its counts. Checked October 21, 2026. Not legal or planning advice.