The property, which went on sale this month, represents a last remnant of a remarkable real estate bonanza fuelled by Chinese money, that saw farms sell for 100 times their official valuations, as mega mansions sprang up in the unlikely semirural setting of Richmond’s low-lying fields.

No 6 Road has unsealed shoulders for much of its length, with brambly ditches running either side to mitigate the swampy conditions. It has no scenery of note, although on Tuesday, a bald eagle sat on a fence post, a dead duck in its talons, and there is a bowling alley and a multiplex cinema at the road’s terminus about a kilometre from the house.

The Hamptons or the French Riviera this is not.

Nevertheless, Layla Yang, the founder of Dracco Pacific Realty, which is marketing the home, said the property represented a bargain, even as the most expensive home for sale in Richmond, the Vancouver satellite that is the most ethnically Chinese city in the world outside Asia.

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“This price, compared to Vancouver Westside? It’s peanuts. It’s nothing,” said the Bentley-driving former Air Canada flight attendant, as we walked through the mansion on Tuesday.

Yang, who specialises in luxury property in the metro Vancouver region and has been a key player in the farmland mansion scene, said “99 per cent” of her clients were originally from mainland China. She is telling them there will be no more homes like this.

“This will be the last one. Not even in our generation. The next generation – you will never see another 23,000 sq ft home be built here,” said Yang.

That is because of the controversy that erupted in Richmond around the phenomenon of the mansion farmhouses.

In 2018, Richmond’s council imposed a maximum size of 4,300 sq ft on new houses on the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), a provincial zoning designed to protect farmland from development. That encompasses No 9431, but its construction was approved well before the size limit.

ALR zoning, introduced in 1974, has protected farms from subdivision and small-lot residential development, but it has attracted mansion builders instead, because farm lots are much bigger than residential sites. The properties are also eligible for lucrative tax breaks, and some see speculative potential if a site can be removed from the ALR – or the zoning is one day abolished altogether.

Critics of farmhouse mansions, like Richmond city councillor Harold Steves, say the mansion phenomenon wasted precious farmland on giant homes and facilities like swimming pools and tennis courts. Genuine farmers were priced out of ownership, and were forced instead to rent fields from the mansion owners, adding a layer of insecurity to their farming, he said.

“Here was an open door to buying farmland,” said Steves, 83, referring to the situation before the size caps. “You buy land cheap. Build a big house. You have an investment you think will make you millions of dollars if you can get it [rezoned] out of the land reserve, and you hardly have to pay any taxes.”

Officially, the government values 9431 No 6 Road at C$4.1 million. But 99 per cent of that is the value of the mansion and other structures on the property; the value of the 9.9 acres of land itself is pegged at just C$44,261, for the purpose of providing the farmland tax breaks.

Dracco’s listing for No 9431 says its property taxes were C$16,034 in 2019. By comparison, a property valued at C$22 million in residential Richmond would face taxes of more than C$140,000 per year.

The current owners paid C$3.4 million for the property in 2010, when the government officially valued it as a farm at C$291,000. But the disconnect between official farmland values and actual sale prices has been even more extreme in other cases; in June 2017, Yang sold a 20-acre farm for C$9.2 million. A few weeks later, the government officially valued the property at C$78,564.

Steves said he first noticed large mansions being built on metro Vancouver farmland in about 2006. But it was not until 2010 that prices exploded.

Property agents began to advertise farmland on the basis of its investment potential rather than its agricultural value. An article in a journal put out by NuCoast Realty from around that time is headlined: “Agricultural land possesses great potential in real estate investment.”

Steves, who plans to retire this year, has been a councillor for 49 years. He entered politics on a platform of preserving Richmond farmland, when his parents’ land was rezoned residential against their wishes; that effectively put their dairy out of business.

“When we were fighting foreign ownership of farmland circa 1970 to 2005 the foreign owners were primarily [from] the USA and the UK and the farmers being evicted were Chinese,” he said, including his parents’ neighbour, Lum Poy, a well-known Richmond figure at the time.

Directly behind 9431 No 6 Road is the second-most expensive property for sale in Richmond. A mere 10,800 sq ft mansion is under construction at 9660 Sidaway Road, priced at C$8.88 million.

Its 2019 property taxes were only C$364, because it is also zoned ALR farmland, but various recreational amenities are planned for much of the property. They include a racecourse and two large ponds that have already been excavated, Google Earth satellite photos show; one is shaped like a swan, while the other features paddle boats and an island in the shape of a duckling.

In 2010, an attempt to introduce a Richmond by-law to restrict construction of non-farm amenities beyond the designated residential footprint on ALR properties resulted in protests from property agents, and it was voted down.

Steves said 9431 No 6 Road “is a direct result of that 2010 decision”.

Eight years later, the mega mansion ban was successfully introduced, but construction approved before the ban was allowed to proceed, so the giant home on 9431 is now hitting the market for the first time.

Bathrooms bigger than flats

Most of 9431 No 6 Road is covered in neat rows of blueberry bushes, but about a quarter of the land is devoted to the house and its grounds, including an extensive lawn of artificial turf, a golf green with two sand bunkers, and a courtyard with a giant chess set.

Micro flats are all the rage in other parts of metro Vancouver, the most unaffordable real estate market in North America, but nothing about 9431 No 6 Road is micro, except maybe the taxes. Think macro.

For example, the home’s nine bedrooms feature ensuite bathrooms/dressing rooms which each pace out at 500-600 sq ft, bigger than many new Vancouver condos. The master suite is difficult to distinguish from the other eight official bedrooms, but Yang’s colleague Edward Zhang pointed out its bathroom’s gleaming brown tiles, which he said were a type of jade.

There is a cinema fitted out for karaoke, and a gymnasium that would not look out of place in a large hotel. Yang gestured at a wine refrigerator in a study as we stroll the hallways. “C$10,000 a bottle,” she said.

The mansion’s owners are Wenli Shan and Liqiu Leng, a title search shows. Yang said they were businesspeople originally from China, although they had recently been living in their Richmond farmhouse; one of the owners was present at the start of our tour, although Zhang said she spoke no English.

“They had very humble beginnings,” said Zhang. “They went from no money, to having a lot of wealth in one generation.”

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Zhang said the couple genuinely enjoyed farming and the property had been replanted four years ago with about 10,000 blueberry bushes, that would eventually produce about 100,000 pounds of fruit per year. “But you know, I don’t think they are selling fruit to make a profit … Maybe just [selling] to friends,” said Yang. “Like a hobby,” added Zhang.

The blueberries may not be a lucrative crop, but they allow the owners to qualify for the farmland tax breaks, which require that a farm of such size sell C$2,500 worth of produce each year.

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Zhang said there was a “cultural aspect” to the size of the home. “In China everyone got so rich, so fast … for a lot of those people, size is wealth, and they come over with the same mindset.”

Yang said she was “very angry” about the backlash against mansion farmhouses. “It doesn’t matter if you are Chinese [or] a farmer, or which country, so long as you do the things according to the law, you should be fine. This is what we call the market economy … and my job is to get every penny I can for my clients.”

Yang suggested envy was behind the backlash. “The majority of people are not used to this tremendous money,” she said. And it was racist, she said, “big time”.

But she said the new mansion laws made the property more valuable, not less. “I know people’s psychology,” Zhang added. “They want what they can’t have.”

Derrick Kutny, 60, runs the topsoil business a few doors down from the mansion. He said he was not a fan of the ALR system, and nor did he support the decision to cap the size of houses on farmland.

He said he did not begrudge any owner building as big a home as they wanted, so long as they complied with the rules in place at the time.

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He agreed with Yang that the recent controversy surrounding large farmhouses was mostly “simple envy”. It may not amount to racism, but “look at most of the owners they complain about. They’re mostly immigrants,” he said.

His own property, where his family has lived since 1972, is on ALR land, but because he is not farming, it does not qualify for the tax breaks. Kutny considered the ALR system antiquated and unnecessary.

“Where did you get your cucumbers from? Your tomatoes? They were grown on concrete,” he said.

Even though Yang said she did not think the ALR would be abolished, or that 9431 would ever lose its farmland designation, she acknowledged that the C$21.98 million price tag reflected its value both as a home and as a potential investment.

“I don’t deny. Look at Terra Nova. It was agriculture. It took a long time, but it converted as residential,” she said, referring to the rezoning of Richmond’s Terra Nova farmlands in 1987, a controversial decision that reshaped Richmond and helps frame debate over farmland preservation to this day.

“This part of Richmond, in my opinion, they will not convert to residential,” said Yang.

But if a potential buyer were to imagine such a profitable rezoning, maybe 50 years from now, in their considerations? “I will tell them everything is possible. It is possible … The buyers will be very successful people and they do have different thinking, from regular people like me. I might say ‘impossible’, but they will say ‘don’t worry Layla. It will be’.”