One of Quebec’s largest office transactions this year had a successful conclusion when the vendor’s brokerage acted as if the office complex wasn’t really an office complex.

“We sold it, but not by saying it’s office,” said Marie-Claire Laflamme-Sanders, one of the Avison Young agents who sold Cominar’s 853,000-square-foot Place Laval in Laval to developer Luc Poirier for $72 million.

Laflamme-Sanders said during the sales process Avison Young raised all the non-office possibilities for the five office towers at Saint-Martin and des Laurentides boulevards. 

“We said it’s a mixed-use complex. We said it’s not office, it’s self-storage, it’s greenhouses on the roof, you can put a school there.”

Laflamme-Sanders, principal, senior vice-president and practice lead, capital markets, Quebec at Avison Young, was speaking during the Montreal Real Estate Forum June 17-18 at the city’s convention centre. 

Buyer to convert one building to self-storage

Place Laval was put on the market last year when “we hadn’t yet reached the bottom of the barrel for office,” she said during a session on local perspectives on real estate investment in Montreal.

Two of the towers are 97 per cent leased with weighted average lease terms of 5.3 years. However, one of the towers, 1 Place Laval, is mostly unoccupied.

She noted Place Laval has excess land of 465,000 square feet with flexible zoning and the potential for over 1,700 residential units. 

Real estate investor Poirier plans to convert one of the office towers for self-storage. 

He was recently named president of Margaux REIT (ALFA-UN-X), a self-storage trust that launched in March on the TSX Venture Exchange. The company already owns several self-storage facilities in Quebec under the Alpha Entrepôt name.

It’s the biggest real estate investment for Poirier, who is one of the investors on Dans l’œil du dragon on Radio-Canada, the French-language version of CBC’s Dragons’ Den.

Bay's closing an opportunity for retail owners

Also at the forum, Martine Sirois, senior director of Altus Group, discussed the commercial real estate outlook for Montreal.

She said the closing of The Bay represents an opportunity for increased revenues for mall owners in Quebec because the department store was paying very low rents. The closures also give developers the potential to densify their sites for uses other than retail. 

The Bay’s shutdown of 12 stores in enclosed malls freed up 1.7 million square feet of retail space in the province, representing about 15 per cent of the retail rental space for these 12 centres. Another 565,000 square feet of retail space is available at The Bay’s former flagship store on Ste. Catherine St. in downtown Montreal.

Some retail is not faring as well as it was before the pandemic, Sirois said, with downtown still far from pre-COVID levels.

Twenty per cent of stores on Ste. Catherine St., Montreal’s main shopping drag, were closed temporarily or permanently in Q1 2025. As for downtown Montreal malls, 24 per cent of stores were closed permanently or temporarily in Q2. 

Good, bad news on the office front

On the office front, the availability rate for class-A space in downtown Montreal dropped from 17.8 per cent in Q4 2023 to 15.7 per cent in Q4 2024.

However, “work from home is here to stay even if the trend is that more and more companies are trying to bring their employees back to the office,” she said. 

Still, she noted the Royal Bank and Scotiabank announced recently their employees are to return to the office of four days per week starting in September, something that could influence other businesses.

Condo market continues to be slow

The condo market in Montreal continues to lag. There were 1,842 unsold new condo units in buildings with 20 units or more in Montreal in Q1 2025, a 50 per cent increase from the corresponding period last year. 

Ville-Marie, the borough that comprises downtown Montreal, had 15.5 months of inventory of condos in Q1 2025, while the island had 6.7 months of inventory.

Laflamme-Sanders said multifamily is the asset class seeing the most benefit from an abundance of liquidity, with major activity from private and institutional investors. Multifamily properties on the market see more than 100 expressions of interest and frequently have 10 to 15 offers, she said.

According to Avison Young, multifamily investment volumes in Quebec last year held firm at $3.8 billion, which is in line with 2021 and 2022. 

However, not all is golden in the multifamily space.

Sébastien Gariepy, president of real estate development company Groupe Inspire, said that because of a reduction in immigration, rentals that are above $1,800 per month in Montreal are taking more time to find takers. These units used to be leased in a weekend, he said.