B.C. Ultimate Guide to Buying & Selling, March 1995
When you walk into the offices of the Niho Land and Cattle Company, it’s easy to believe you’ve slipped back to earlier times in British Columbia.
Cattle skulls, guns, knives, frontier pictures and paintings displayed on barnboard walls might not be the norm in real estate office décor but then Rudy Nielsen isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill guy. When he and his commercial real estate business went belly up in the late 1970’s,
Duart Snow, Cottage Magazine, Fall 1994
Rudy Nielsen has this John Wayne replica Bowie knife. The president of Niho Land & Cattle Company- among the leading players on BC’s booming recreational property market- keeps it as a reminder that his family firm became a winner by being different.
He takes the ornate, foot-long knife from a case in his office and stabs it into a well-used nick in the top of his rustic wooden desk: “It reminds me how it all works… It reminds me to be different.
James Risdon, Business in Vancouver, 1995
Urban cowboys are snatching up ranchland within a five-hour drive of Vancouver.
Waiting to sell it to them is Rudy Nielsen, the land developer who heads New Westminster-based NIHO Land & Cattle Company Ltd. and LandQuest Realty Corp.
In some cases, the urbanites who head for the hills take their role playing very seriously.
“I know a group of guys who have this land and a trailer on it and every Friday night they leave and put on red shirts,
Rudy Nielsen, Equity Magazine, 1994
Ten years ago our company decided that instead of investing our future into commercial and residential real estate investments, which we had done for some 20 years we would change our focus and make a business out of investing in recreational properties.
Our priority was to be diversified. So we acquired only ocean, lake, and river-front properties, islands, exotic hideaways, small ranches and timber stands.
Jurock Real Estate Investor, August / September 1993
To some people, “recreation” is a $400,000 home or a “basic” $230,000 condo in Whistler. To others, it’s a vacant piece of wilderness land near Alaska. One man’s nightingale is another’s owl.
Whatever the vision, many people have given up looking for their own escape places. Properties seem too expensive or they don’t want to buy into a co-op purchase of a large acreage where they may never see a return on (or even use of) the land.
Olivia Scott, The Vancouver Province, August 21, 1992
It’s a realtor’s dream.
An entire B.C. town complete with shopping centre and housing for 2,000 people is for sale at $23.5 million.
And Kitsault, north of Prince Rupert, is vacant so there’s nothing to do but move in.
“There is a caretaker and his wife there who keep the lawns mowed, the trees pruned, the roads cleared,”