A former Langley condo developer, recently released from a California prison where he was serving time for wire fraud, has been fined $75,000 by the B.C. Financial Services Agency.
Between 2014 and 2017, Mark Chandler promoted and sold units in the Murrayville House condo complex, which was then under construction near Langley Memorial Hospital.
Work proceeded slowly on the four-storey wood-framed structure, and debts to Chandler’s creditors piled up.
Pre-sales took place, but what many of the pre-sale buyers didn’t know was that Chandler was selling the same units to multiple people. According to an investigation in 2017, some units were sold to two buyers, some to three, and one unit was promised to four separate people.
Overall, 92 units were promised to 152 would-be buyers.
Many of the contracts with potential buyers were oddly structured, with some also supposedly loans – some buyers bought at a discount rate, but were told they would either be able to close on the condo units, or another buyer would buy the unit at full price, with the difference passed along to the first purchaser.
The BCFSA alerted the RCMP to the situation at Murrayville House, but Chandler was never charged with a crime in Canada.
“Chandler’s actions were predatory and deceptive, causing tremendous financial hardship and distress for the consumers he misled,” said Jon Vandall, senior vice president of financial professionals at BCFSA.
In his ruling, BCFSA hearing officer Gareth Reeves wrote that the money put towards the condos does not appear to have been put in trust, as is legally required for real estate transactions.
Instead, Chandler’s company “spent significant sums of money on Mr. Chandler’s personal expenses and the acquisition or improvement of other properties.”
In fact, the investigation found that total deposits paid directly to Chandler’s company totalled more than $10 million.
Murrayville House was put into receivership and pre-sale buyers never got their units.
The Langley Advance Times has previously reported on how Chandler acquired or attempted to acquire numerous other properties around Langley while he was marketing Murrayville House, although no developments came to fruition. He also took control of a shuttered golf course near Merritt; it never re-opened under his management.
By the time the BCFSA ordered Chandler to stop marketing Murrayville House and began an investigation in 2017, the Murrayville House project owed $62 million to various creditors – more than double the estimated value of the homes.
Meanwhile, during the entire time he was marketing Murrayville House and buying up land, Chandler was fighting extradition to the United States on fraud charges.
In 2010 and 2011, Chandler was involved in a purported real estate project in Los Angeles. After Chandler lost his lengthy court battle to avoid extradition, he was sent to California in 2019, where he eventually pleaded guilty to a single charge of wire fraud. Chandler was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution to his victims.
Chandler was released from prison in 2025 and was served with the BCFSA hearing notice on Feb. 14 last year, the day he was deported back to Canada.
Chandler never appeared at the BCFSA hearings against him and did not send a lawyer to represent him.
The BCFSA fined Chandler personally $25,000 and his company $50,000. Those were maximum fines available at the time of his rule violations.
After the activities of Chandler and his associates were discovered, amendments were made to REDMA in 2018 to increase the maximum penalties from $25,000 to $250,000 for an individual, and from $50,000 up to $500,000 for a corporation.
Chandler and his company have also been ordered to pay $66,498 for the BCFSA’s investigation costs.
The BCFSA has previously sanctioned associates of Chandler who also worked in marketing Murrayville House condos. Gurpreet Singh Chhina and Rashpal Singh Kambo had their real estate licences suspended and were each fined the maximum penalty of $10,000.
“Chhina and Kambo were both aware the units they were selling had already been sold, and in doing so put their clients at significant risk,” said Vandall. “Their actions demonstrate a flagrant disregard for consumers’ best interests, which is not just unethical, it’s unacceptable.”
Accountant Vasant Patel, who worked with Chandler, was ordered to pay $40,000 in penalties and enforcement costs for helping Chandler and doing real estate work without a licence.
Chattar Flora, an associate of Patel, was also sanctioned for unlicenced activity and fined $70,000.