The company was heavily leveraged with debt used to purchase vast holdings of real estate throughout Canada and the United States.
This debt, combined with the recession of the early 1980s that saw land values tumble, resulted in Nu-West losing its place of dominance in the industry.
After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Manitoba, he was a school teacher in that province for two years, working the summers on construction jobs.
In 1957, two of McConnell's partners, Clifford Lee and Gordon Clark, were saddled with Nu-West Homes Ltd., a 12-year-old near bankrupt homebuilding company located in Calgary.
Scurfield took Peter Vast, a Dutch immigrant who was 10 years older and who had worked as a construction crew leader for McConnell, to Calgary with him as his only employee.
Scurfield slowly and methodically enlarged Nu-West, first through geographical expansion and later through a series of acquisitions starting in Canada and then in the United States' Sun Belt.
The financial growth was the result of Canadian land sales, U.S. real estate operations and the successful operations of Voyager Petroleums Ltd. During 1979 the wholly owned Voyager Petroleums increased production and reserves of oil and gas through an aggressive exploration program, and they also increased their acreage holdings substantially.
[1] Nu-West ended the 1970s proud of their achievements to that point, and entered the 1980 with business goals that included the plan to increase their real estate activities, with emphasis on land and commercial development, and also the expansion of their oil and gas investment so that within five years it would employ approximately one-third of their assets.
[1] By 1981, just 12 years after going public in 1969, Nu-West evolved from being a poorly regarded Calgary builder to one having operations in five Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario) and ten U.S. states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas).
[2] The negative effects of the NEP, combined with the North American-wide recession of the early 1980s that saw land values tumble,[3] resulted in Nu-West, who was heavily leveraged with debt, losing its place of dominance in the industry.