Aoyuan International is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the troubled China Aoyuan Group, which is based in Guangzhou and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It recently sold a massive Burnaby condo development that has been going through the approval process for $215 million. Earlier, it quietly cancelled an eight-storey luxury building it had been planning on Vancouver’s West Side.

Potential buyers in the market are now wondering about the future of Aoyuan’s third project, One Central in Surrey, which will be a 44-storey, mixed-use building with 550 units that is being touted as one of the city’s tallest residential towers.

Aoyuan International’s general manager for Canada gave no details when asked if the Surrey development could also be up for grabs.

“We’re excited for the topping off of One Central in Surrey this June, and for residents to be moving in (next year),” Fan Yang told Postmedia in a short statement, adding that significant progress was also being made on construction of the first phase of its M2M development in Toronto.

When Aoyuan International bought a vast site near Brentwood Town Centre in Burnaby in 2017, it was the second-most expensive land deal of the year in Metro Vancouver.

That year, it also bought a smaller, but prime spot in South Granville and applied to build an eight-storey building with 40 condos, named The Granville.

Those developments came during boom years as Chinese buyers spent $3.9 billion on Canadian commercial property in 2016. But by 2020, that figure had fallen by 95 per cent to just $181.5 million, and then dropped to only $51.1 million in 2021, based on data on known purchases over $10 million, according to CBRE Limited.

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