Groupe Brivia has sold a 14.9-acre redevelopment site in the Montreal borough of LaSalle to Groupe Laberge, which has enlisted Groupe Kevlar to transform it into a multi-phased, mixed-use community.

Brivia had acquired the LaSalle Centre Carnaval strip mall site at the intersection of Newman Boulevard and Leger Street from RioCan and Harden Group in 2021. It then took it through all of the rezoning approvals stages needed to develop a project with 1,800 housing units and a commercial component.

In an off-market deal brokered by CBRE, Brivia sold the site to Laberge for $62 million for the planned 2.3-million-square-foot development with 2,150 housing units and retail/commercial space. Ten per cent of the land will be dedicated to a new park.

“It’s a strategic location where you're close to downtown, close to the South Shore, close to a lot of amenities, excellent transit access and local services,” Kevlar executive vice-president Karl Perto told RENX. “And there are plans that the city has approved for Newman Boulevard to be revitalized.”

How the Centre Carnaval deal works

Kevlar itself will develop 1,800 housing units. A portion of the site is also being sold to the City of Montreal for a net price of $12 million, where the city plans to build 350 affordable units. 

“Kevlar will act as the developer and oversee the planning, approval and execution of the project, leasing or selling the units if we go with condos in the next phases,” said Perto of the portion of the site retained by Laberge.

“Laberge is a really good group. They have 5,000 units already, mainly across Quebec City and Montreal, and they're really active. We met with them and showed them the project. They saw it as a great opportunity and that's how we started working with them in December on that site.” 

“The project will probably take eight to 10 years, and not everybody wants to get involved with a deal that would take that long,” Kevlar founder and president Rene Bellerive said in the same interview. “But Laberge is a good investor that wants to keep the property and doesn't want to sell it.

"So we were very happy to be able to find an investor that had the same vision that we had.” 

The development’s phases

The site is currently anchored by a Super C grocery store and there’s also a four-storey office building, a Laurentian Bank branch, other small commercial and retail tenants, plus lots of surface parking.

The bank branch is leaving and its building will be demolished. The first phase of construction, incorporating approximately 700 housing units, will be built there and in the parking area. Negotiations are ongoing with Super C to relocate its store to a different part of the site.

Construction of the first phase is slated to start before October of 2026.

The second phase will include the demolition of the rest of the strip mall to make way for adding infrastructure, services and a new public street before the rest of the development happens.

In addition to the relocated Super C, the project’s other non-residential elements could potentially include a daycare, a pharmacy, a restaurant, a medical clinic and other commercial/retail uses.

“Because we have a big site, we're more flexible on what we can do and we can time our phases with the market,” Perto said.

The Montreal residential and multi-family market

“Despite a noticeable slowdown in other major Canadian markets, Montreal’s residential land outperforms with an increase in investment volumes of 28 per cent year-over-year for the first half of the year compared to 2024,” Guillaume Jacob, senior vice-president with CBRE Montreal's national investment team, wrote in an email to RENX.

“We are seeing investors and developers having more conviction on the long-term fundamentals of the multifamily and condominium markets in Montreal, regardless of near-term headwinds. We feel momentum is building and developers are ready for their next project.

“The Newman project is a 10-year development which will be completed in an entirely new economic cycle with new realities, but likely still a supply-demand imbalance which will be favourable to Kevlar and Groupe Laberge.”