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Colonnade BridgePort making inroads in the GTA

4 years ago

Ottawa real estate investment and management company Colonnade BridgePort’s first move into the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) was both successful and short-lived. In the past couple of years though, it’s been establishing an ever-firmer footprint in the market.

Artis REIT (AX-UN-T) has indefinitely postponed a plan to spin off its retail assets into a separate REIT in the wake of an increasingly testy dispute with dissident unitholders led by Sandpiper Group.

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General Motors plans to reopen its Oshawa assembly plant, invest up to $1.3 billion in the facility and hire up to 1,700 workers. GM’s planned new investments also include $109 million in St. Catharines and $500,000 in operations at the Woodstock Parts Distribution Centre.

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COGIR Real Estate has launched seven projects worth $500 million in the Montreal area since the reopening of construction sites in the spring. To everyone’s surprise, it also built more Quebec homes year-over-year in the nine months of 2020.

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As the coronavirus pandemic rages and most downtown office employees in many cities work from home at least through year-end, urban retailers’ loss is turning out to be suburban shopping centres’ gain, said JLL head of Canadian retail Tim Sanderson.

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Montreal-headquartered flex-office provider Breather has brought on Moelis & Company, an investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions, to consider a possible sale or capital raise, Business Insider reported. Breather CEO Bryan Murphy said the company grew 250 per cent in 2019.

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Metro Vancouver industrial tenants, especially in distribution, should brace for higher leasing costs because of extremely tight vacancy rates, vanishing land and a developer switch to selling rather than leasing new space, according to Avison Young’s Metro Vancouver Industrial Overview.

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The federal government’s new commercial rent subsidy has hit a stumbling block as Ottawa tries to fix a requirement that would force entrepreneurs to pay rent before receiving funding, despite their diminished pandemic revenues.

CMLS Mortgage Commentary

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ViveRE Communities Inc. (VCOM-X) announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Village View No. 3 Limited Partnership, whose sole asset is a multifamily rental property at 51 Noel Ave., Saint John, N.B. The purchase price for the property is $11,250,000.

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Céline Dion has sold the Le Mirage golf club – a 36-hole complex in Terrebonne – to real estate group Messier, Savard et Associés (MSA). MSA’s four partners include former Montreal Canadiens defenceman/general manager Serge Savard, and ex-Canadiens goalkeeper José Théodore,

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Skyllen Pacific is planning an 18 storey market condominium tower and two three-storey market rental buildings on Pendrell Street in Vancouver’s West End. The buildings would include 109 market units, 16 market rental units and four levels of underground parking.

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Subversive Real Estate Acquisition REIT (SVX-U-NE) announced it has postponed the closing of its proposed qualifying transaction and withdrawn the optional redemption event that it had extended to holders of its restricted voting units in connection therewith.

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Walmart (WMT-N) said it was selling its 90-plus stores in Argentina to South American supermarket chain owner Grupo de Narváez. Walmart did not disclose the size of the deal, but said it would record about a $1 billion after-tax, non-cash loss.

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Many sectors of the CRE industry have been devastated by the coronavirus, from hospitality to retail to downtown office and apartment markets, and some industry leaders who supported Biden said they believe he will take the health crisis more seriously.

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What is more profitable: demolishing an entire poor-performing shopping mall and transforming it into a last-mile distribution centre or integrating parts of an existing mall structure into an adaptive-reuse project? Powers Brown Architecture found that sometimes renovations were more advantageous.

 

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Seoul has emerged as Asia’s top market for office and retail property deals after the South Korean capital averted a lockdown by controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. Office transactions totaled almost $9 billion in Seoul through September, outpacing $7.7 billion in Tokyo.

SVN Apartment University

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In recent years, the Canada Revenue Agency has been cracking down on taxpayers who, in its view, are inappropriately claiming the principal residence exemption (PRE), particularly as it relates to flipping houses.

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Property taxes increased for Edmonton homeowners for 2020, but the bill was reasonable compared to other Canadian cities, the 2020 Canadian Property Tax Rate Benchmark Report by Altus Group found. Edmonton saw a 2.7 per cent rise compared to Calgary’s 13 per cent.

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In a 450-square-foot condo, the only place Stephen Tyson was able to put his desk was right beside his bed. Pre-COVID-19, it seemed like a good idea to trade living space for downtown Toronto’s many amenities. Now? Not so much.

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The average price of a detached house in Greater Vancouver will hit a record high of $1.7 million in 2021, according to the B.C. Real Estate Association (BCREA), which also calls for all-time high house prices next year in the Fraser Valley.

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