Too big for their own good: the backlash against big real estate signs in Chilliwack

The Maharaj Brothers’ distinctively large gold and black signs are impossible to miss in downtown Chilliwack.

Which may have been what doomed them.

Earlier this month, the City of Chilliwack changed its sign bylaw specifically to force the prominent realty company to downsize its signs, with one councillor declaring the need to change the rules due to a “couple bad apples.”

But Rickneel Maharaj doesn’t feel like a bad apple. He says he and his brother followed the city’s rules—even if some took umbrage at the scale and success of their marketing efforts.

The signs

Beginning last year, Chilliwack bylaw officials began fielding increasing numbers of complaints about larger-than-normal real estate advertising signs in residential areas.

Instead of standard knee-high signs posted outside a home that is for sale, residents began to see larger signs triple or quadruple the size. The signs seemed to linger longer than normal—with staff saying that many remained outside homes for 18 months. Staff said that some of the signs were located on properties belonging to the realtors or family members. Others were on sites not seemingly listed for sale.

All signs in a municipality are subject to local sign bylaw, but complaints have been rare. In 2020 and 2021, the city received just three complaints about large or permanent real estate signs. Since the start of 2022, more than 30 complaints have been filed at city hall, according to an October staff report to council. (That still only amounts to about two complaints a month.)

In its recent report to council, staff wrote that most complaints involve only a tiny number of agents’ signs. They wrote that they have attempted to resolve the concerns by educating agents and property owners, and by attending a meeting of the Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board. But while some realtors amended their ways, others persisted.

So earlier this month, Chilliwack formally changed its bylaw to explicitly restrict the size of real estate signs to eight square feet and to a maximum height of 5.75 feet on most residential properties.

“It’s really just been a couple bad apples that have ruined it for the whole bunch,” Coun. Jeff Shields said. “For these few that decide they want effectively billboards in a residential area, it just doesn’t work.”

“It is unfortunate,” his colleague Bud Mercer added. “It appears only a handful of individuals [have] pushed us this way.”

‘We just read the bylaws’

Upon the Current’s request, the City of Chilliwack provided a list of 22 properties that had been subject of complaints over the last two years.

The Current visited many of the properties first-hand, while using Google Street View to survey the rest. That survey suggests that more than half the complaints appear to have been triggered by signs belonging to a single real estate team: the Maharaj Brothers.

Over the last few years, the faces of Rickneel and Praneel Maharaj—coupled with their uniquely flashy gold-and-black colour scheme—have become increasingly ubiquitous on the north side of Chilliwack.

Their First Avenue downtown office is emblazoned with the huge photos of the two brothers. Their vehicles are wrapped in advertising and unmissable. And then there are those signs, which are modelled less on traditional real estate signage and more on the wood-framed structures frequently seen on large political election signs.

Rickneel Maharaj said the signs are—or were—a marketing strategy that was both effective and legal. (The fact that the city had to change its rules to ban the signs suggests city staff believed so too.)

“We didn’t break any rules,” he told The Current. “We just read the bylaws.”

Maharaj stressed that he and his brother don’t want to antagonize the city or residents. He says they grew up on Fairfield Island in Chilliwack, continue to live there, and will continue living there for years to come.

He said he and his brother were using the resources available to them in the most effective way.

“We don’t come from a place where we can just go get billboards on the highway and pay for expensive marketing,” he said. “We just leveraged the listings that we were getting.”

Maharaj said that the signs also worked for, and were requested by, clients, whom he said liked their prominence compared to most other real estate signs. In a world where being seen is valuable, Maharaj said he and his brother were operating within the rules to build their business and client base.

“If you look across the Chilliwack library, we have an office there with our faces five feet tall, plastered along the wall, right? Why? Because we want people to know we're here to do business, we're here to sell your house, we want people to know we're not scared to be seen.”

While the city said some houses did not appear to be actively listed, Maharaj said they were privately listed on investor networks. (The practice is not uncommon, though recent provincial rule changes will require properties to be listed on public-facing sites if signage appears on a property.) Other parts of the strategy, like leaving a sold-sign up longer than perhaps normal, leaned on a lack of clear city rules. (Now, signs will have to be removed 15 days after a property is sold or removed from the market.)

Maharaj wonders a bit why other realtors’ signs didn’t trigger the same complaints that attracted the city’s scrutiny to his billboards. He points to the fact that one complaint seems to have involved not a sign, but his personal vehicle and work trailer parked on his property and wrapped with marketing imagery within sight of the road.

But Maharaj also says he has taken the rule changes in stride, saying he’ll follow them to the letter.

Mostly, he thinks the complaints, and the new restrictions, have come about because the strategy he and his brother employed was both new and extremely effective.

“There are no realtors that took that confident approach that we did,” he said. I know there’s people that didn’t like it… But it was all well within the rules and at the end of the day, that’s what our clients see, that’s what they like and that’s what makes us different.”