Twenty Years On: What 100 Homes Across Greater Vancouver Taught Us

On a Lynn Valley framing job this past spring, our lead framer paused before the rough opening was sheeted. He had spotted a load path that would crowd the casing on the master bedroom window. He fixed it in under a minute, then went back to work.

I had hired him through my father, who first met him in 1998 on a North Shore stucco job. That kind of memory is the company.

Major Homes turns twenty this summer. We have delivered more than 100 custom homes across Greater Vancouver in that time, and the family lineage in residential construction runs back another generation before that. This is a moment to think honestly about what twenty years has actually taught us, and what we want the next twenty to look like.

My father, Major Garcha, founded Major Homes in 2002. He spent the twenty years before that running a stucco company across the Lower Mainland. Before that, he was on his own father's job sites. Three generations of building runs through the family, and that lineage has shaped how we work.

The stucco years mattered more than they sound. Most builders learn the trades by managing them. My father learned framing, envelope, and finish carpentry by working alongside the people who do them. When he founded Major Homes, he brought a level of trade fluency into the office that we have tried to keep ever since. It is the reason we hire framers, finish carpenters, and concrete crews as long term partners, not as commodity subtrades.

The company started small. Single family homes in North Vancouver, Burnaby, and Surrey. We did not advertise for the first eight years. Every project came through word of mouth from a client, an architect, or a trade.

That foundation taught us the value of letting the work speak for itself, which is still the standard. You can see the full record of completed projects or read more about how the firm was built if you want the longer story.

Not every lesson from twenty years of building survives the retelling. Some are mundane. Some are technical. The three below have shown up so often that we treat them as foundational to how we run a project today.

The framers, concrete crews, finish carpenters, and mechanical subs who were good twenty years ago are still good. The marketing forward ones who showed up for a season and vanished did not last because the work was not there.

Major Homes runs with a core group of subtrades, most of whom we have used for over a decade. A few we have used since the year my father founded the firm. They know how we detail an envelope, how we expect a job site to look at the end of the day, and how we want change orders handled.

The practical result for clients: when something unusual comes up on site, we are not interviewing a new sub. We are calling someone who has seen it before on one of our projects. That saves days on the schedule and removes most of the risk that gets priced into a stranger's bid.

Twenty years ago I think the industry talked about permits the way it talked about the weather. Something to wait out. That framing is wrong, and it costs builders and owners real time.

The District of North Vancouver, the District of West Vancouver, the City of Burnaby, the Township of Langley, the City of Coquitlam, and the City of Surrey are all reasonable to work with when you submit a complete, code compliant package the first time. The delays we see in the field almost always come from incomplete drawings, missing engineering, or a builder who treats a comment letter as an adversarial event.

Our experience across Greater Vancouver is that the planners and inspectors are professionals with workloads. We submit clean packages, respond to comments within days, and stay in touch through the review. The result is permit timelines that are predictable, not aspirational.

Owners spend the visible portion of their decision making energy on finishes. Counters, cabinets, flooring, fixtures. Those choices matter. But twenty years of follow up calls has made one thing clear: the homes that perform are the homes with a well designed envelope.

Continuous exterior insulation. A proper air barrier. Triple pane windows specified for the orientation, not the catalogue. Flashing details that respect the rain we actually get in this part of the country. These are the choices that determine how a home feels in February and how the bills read in July.

This lesson is part of why we committed to EnerGuide ratings on every home starting in 2016, and why most of what we now build is also Built Green Canada certified. The envelope is the part you cannot redo cheaply later. It has to be right the first time.

Twenty years in, the firm looks different than it did at the start. We have delivered more than 100 custom homes across Greater Vancouver. I joined full time in 2015 after several years in banking and a real estate licence. My background sits alongside my father's, and the two sides of the firm cover both the trade and the financial pieces of a build.

We operate across West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Surrey, White Rock, Langley, Maple Ridge, and through the Fraser Valley. We are HPO certified, registered with BC Housing, and our homes carry the 2-5-10 Pacific Home Warranty. We are members of HAVAN and the Canadian Home Builders Association of BC. We hold a Built Green Canada membership and a Built Green certification on most of what we deliver.

The sustainability program we started in 2016 is no longer optional. Heat pumps, solar ready conduit, low flow fixtures, grey water systems where the lot allows, and EnerGuide ratings on every home. These are the standard, not the upgrade. You can read more about how we build custom homes today.

BC will require every new home to be net zero energy ready by 2032. That is a finish line our industry has been moving toward since the BC Energy Step Code was introduced, and most builders are not where they need to be. We have been preparing for it since before it was announced.

The second twenty years will look like the first in one important way: the same standard on every home, and the same people checking the work. The materials will change. The systems will get smarter. The fundamentals will not.

If you are thinking about a build in the next two to five years, the timing matters. The earlier you start the conversation, the more time we have to walk lots together and to design around the code horizon. We are happy to talk. You can reach the team through the contact page.