A strong year for business licenses being issued in Kamloops in 2024.
The Executive Director of Venture Kamloops says around 800 licenses were put out last year. Jim Anderson says there were 751 new license issued to the end of November and that figure does not include renewals. He notes that there is usually in the neighbourhood of 40-50 licenses issued in the final month of the year.
Anderson says the strong numbers don’t always mean that the number of businesses operating in Kamloops has grown, although he does suspect sizeable growth through 2024.
He says there were a couple of significant developments in the city that made Kamloops more attractive to perspective businesses. “Things changed with the rezoning of the airport earlier in the year. And then the groundbreaking up at Iron Mask a little later in the year. The possibility for development of industrial land really changed the landscape. So it’s been, kind of ramping up throughout 2024.”
“I can tell you that the marketplace for new business opportunities is definitely still hot.”
Anderson says there is no one dominant sector or business type that is entering the Kamloops market which is a good thing for the local economy. “I can tell you, after thorough research, we have no idea what the trend is. It’s across the board in any number of different sectors. I think that there are certain groups of sectors, retail for example, that businesses can be grouped in. But within that grouping, the businesses are so widely varied that they don’t constitute a trend in our book.”
“There’s 6500 business licenses, roughly, in Kamloops. That is not a huge sample size. So you can’t take all the retail businesses and call them one type of business. It will just skew it and not really give you a true picture of what’s going on… There are just a ton of different lines of business in the local economy. And they’re they’re growing. It’s broadening every day.”
“Several years ago, Venture Kamloops was the representative of a study conducted by SFU exploring diversity of economies in sort of a post-forest industry driven area in the interior,” says Anderson, “I was speaking to the professor who was running the study. He asked, ‘How do you feel about the diversity of the economy in Kamloops?’ And I said, I thought it was pretty good. He agreed. The message that he gave me was that if you feel your economy is searching for diversity, you’ve got a problem. And that was not a problem that Kamloops had.”
Looking ahead through 2025, Anderson says Kamloops is in a really good position to attract new business. “Our tactical plan that we work on here in the office is very specifically around taking advantage of the new industrial land that has become available. We’re in the process of doing research and working with our data partners to develop a new fresh set of data that highlights the opportunities and the financial implications of industrial development at Kamloops. We will be hitting the road fairly heavily all the way through quarters two, three and four this year, just reinforcing that opportunities do exist here and that [Venture Kamloops is] here to make sure it goes smoothly.”
“So we’re actually pretty excited, because we we haven’t had the combination of new data and new land for quite some time. So we’re, I think we’re sitting right in the sweet spot to really do good things in 2025.”
