A short 1990s street in Davis Bay Estates, where the water bill and the ditch belong to two different governments.
Where Tamarack Place sits, and the other places we attend
around Davis Bay. Every name on the map is a link.
Tamarack Place, also written Tamarack Road
The street is Tamarack Place. Land records and property listings use that form without exception, though it is often written Tamarack Road on maps and directories. It lies on the Davis Bay hillside inside the District of Sechelt, above Highway 101 and inland of the bay. Documented civic addresses are 4716, 4731, 4733, 4736, 4779, 4785 and 4791, a tight range across a small number of properties. Two postal codes appear on it, the old rural V0N 3A2 and the newer V7Z 0E8. The house at 4779 Tamarack Place stands at 49.44623 north and 123.723305 west. Listings on the street use the subdivision name Davis Bay Estates.
The houses here went up in the middle 1990s
4779 Tamarack Place was built in 1995: three bedrooms, three bathrooms, 2,672 square feet, a two-car garage and a lot of 9,688 square feet. It sold on 5 February 2025 for $998,000, completing on 27 February 2025. That age places this street between the other generations of housing on the same hillside. It is more than three decades newer than the 1958 bungalow stock documented on Whitaker Road and two decades newer than the 1974 and 1981 houses on Fir Road, and it is a generation older than the strata houses that broke ground off Laurel Avenue in August 2022. A mid-1990s house is now at the age where the roof, the hot water tank and the original mechanical equipment are all at or past the end of a first service life at the same time.
A local street is the last one plowed
The District of Sechelt clears its own streets on three priorities. First come major arterials such as Norwest Bay Road and Trail Avenue, school bus and transit routes, and the access routes to emergency services. Second come collector streets, with Ballie Road and Dolphin Road given as the District's examples. Third come local streets, and every residential street above Davis Bay is in that third group. The District also states that gravel roads are not plowed at all, because gravel destroys plow blades, and that gravel trails are neither salted nor cleared. Under Bylaw 516, 2012, section 43, the owner of a property is responsible for clearing the sidewalk across their own frontage, which is an obligation that does not pause when the owner is 400 kilometres away.
Two governments own the pipe in one trench
Potable water here is not a District service. It comes from the regional district's Chapman system, the same supply that serves about 27,000 people, and Davis Bay was included in Phase 3 of the universal water meter rollout. Stage 4 restrictions and the 2022 state of local emergency applied on these streets. Sanitary sewer, storm drainage and the roadside ditches are District of Sechelt responsibilities, handled through the Sechelt Water Resource Centre at 5678 Surf Circle, which opened in 2014, is certified LEED Gold, and cost $24.9 million. It is designed to treat 4,000 cubic metres a day and averages 2,200. An owner reporting a problem therefore has to know which of the two systems the problem is in before picking up the telephone, and the answer is not obvious from the street.
One dwelling in ten in Sechelt was empty on census day
There is no separate Statistics Canada geography for Davis Bay, so the figures that exist are for the District of Sechelt as a whole, census subdivision 5929011. Of 5,738 total private dwellings, 5,128 were occupied by usual residents on census day, leaving 610, or 10.6 per cent, that were not. The median age is 57.6 and 36.6 per cent of residents are 65 or older. Twenty-eight per cent of the housing stock was built before 1981, and 150 dwellings were recorded as needing major repairs. Sechelt does not permit an un-hosted short-term rental of a secondary residence, so a house that used to pay for itself over summer weekends now stands shut between the owner's own visits, with no tenant arriving to find the furnace off.
What a check on Tamarack Place covers
Hot water tank, furnace and the floor beneath both, on equipment now around 30 years old
Heat holding at its set temperature, or the main valve closed and the system emptied
The two-car garage: overhead door, side door, and vehicles, tools and bicycles inside it
Roof, flashing and skylights, and the gutters and downspouts that feed the hillside drainage
The driveway culvert and the roadside ditch, cleared rather than inspected from the car
Snow load on the roof and the deck, and the frontage the bylaw makes the owner responsible for
Crawlspace or basement for standing water, staining and the smell of damp
Mail, flyers and parcels, and any note or card left at the door
A dated photographic record covering all of the above, filed the same day
Home insurance policies normally require that a house left empty while the heating season runs be attended by a competent person on a stated cycle, in a great many wordings at gaps of four days or less, or that the water be shut off and the system drained instead. The intervals are not standard across the industry. Read the clause in your own policy and set the visits from that.
What it costs
A scheduled check at Tamarack Place is
$55 a visit, plus
$10 travel. The travel charge is the same
everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee.
See the full price list.
Where these facts come from
Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are
listed so you can read them yourself.
