Montreal-based Brasswater has acquired the Carling Executive Centre for $53 million, marking the third sale of a major office complex in Ottawa this year and one of the largest suburban office transactions in the city’s history. Brasswater said Thursday it has closed a deal to buy the three-building, 290,000-square-foot property at 1525, 1545 and 1565 […]
Montreal-based Brasswater has acquired the Carling Executive Centre for $53 million, marking the third sale of a major office complex in Ottawa this year and one of the largest suburban office transactions in the city’s history.
Brasswater said Thursday it has closed a deal to buy the three-building, 290,000-square-foot property at 1525, 1545 and 1565 Carling Ave. from Crown Realty Partners.
“When I buy an office building, for me it's all about feel,” Brasswater founder and president Ian Quint told OBJ on Friday morning. “Do you want to come to work here every day? Do you get a good feeling? And immediately when I toured those buildings, I got a good feeling.”
It’s the first acquisition in the Ottawa area for Brasswater, which was founded in 2014 as Groupe Quint and now owns more than 12 million square feet of office, industrial and retail real estate across 100-plus properties, mostly in Quebec and the United States.
Quint cited the class-A office complex’s easy access to the Queensway, close proximity to downtown and diverse mix of 55 tenants as major factors in his decision to buy the Carling Executive Centre.
Quint also praised Crown Realty, which acquired the buildings from QuadReal Property Group for $56.5 million in 2019, for its strong management of the complex. The Toronto-based firm spent $2.3 million to modernize the buildings with upgraded common areas and enhanced tenant amenities such as a fitness centre and restaurant.
Quint said he first toured the buildings about two months ago and sensed from the get-go that they would be a good fit for Brasswater’s portfolio.
“I remember I left my visit there and I called my head of acquisitions and I said, ‘We're buying these,’” he recalled with a chuckle. “I fell in love.”
The buildings had been for sale since late 2023. Other potential buyers had considered acquiring the properties, but those deals never materialized, allowing Brasswater to enter the Ottawa market.
The three buildings are now 90 per cent leased, up from 75 per cent when Crown Realty acquired them seven years ago. Their net operating income has increased 65 per cent in the same period, and Quint is confident revenues from the buildings will rise further as more new tenants move in.
“There’s a lot of (leasing) activity,” he said. “Even during due diligence, we responded to a lot of RFPs. We’ll think we’ll get (occupancy) to 100 (per cent) by the end of the year, hopefully.”
The complex’s tenants come from a wide range of industries, including tech, professional services and real estate. The region’s largest occupier of office space, the federal government, doesn’t really factor into the mix — which Quint considers a plus because of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the feds’ return-to-office strategy.
“That's one of the other things that we loved about this portfolio,” he said. “There's no real government tenancies. We're not dependent on that at all. I guess people like to have government leases, but … we're not thrilled about government leases, and we're not dependent on them at all.”
'Looking at Ottawa for a while'
Crown Realty will continue to manage the Carling Executive Centre and work with Brasswater on leasing the property, the company said in a news release on Thursday.
“This transaction reflects the strength of Crown’s integrated platform and our hands-on approach to real estate,” Crown Realty managing partner Scott Watson said in the release.
“Through targeted capital investment, active leasing, and a continued focus on tenant experience, we successfully enhanced the quality and performance of the portfolio. We are excited to work with Brasswater and continue supporting the asset with our Real Estate Services platform.”
While the acquisition is Brasswater’s first in the nation’s capital, it’s not the firm’s first attempt to purchase local office space.
A tentative deal that would have seen the company acquire a building in downtown Ottawa fell through after a tenant vacated an entire floor during the due-diligence process, Quint said.
But that hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for the National Capital Region.
“We’ve been looking at Ottawa for a while, in all the commercial asset classes, retail, office and industrial,” Quint explained. “First of all, it's a market that’s very accessible and close for us. We do want to do more (acquisitions) in Ontario and across Canada as well, and it’s a great kind of entry point for us.
“We believe in the market. It's obviously a government town. The government likes to spend in their own backyard. So it's really one of the top markets that we've been targeting, and we're very happy about the acquisition.”
Quint said he hopes it’s the first of many more deals in Ottawa.
“We do want to grow our presence in the very near term there, and we hope (the Carling acquisition) is going to establish us and we'll be able to generate more opportunities, because we weren't on anyone's radar in Ottawa,” he added. “So now that we're making it clear that we're there and we want to do more things, hopefully we'll get more inbound opportunities and we'll be able to grow the portfolio.”
The transaction is another sign that activity in Ottawa’s commercial real estate investment market is heating up after a tepid 2025 that saw no major office properties in the region change hands.
By contrast, Brasswater’s purchase of the Carling Executive Centre is already the third major office deal in Ottawa this year.
In February, Morguard announced it had agreed to sell a 14-storey tower at 131 Queen St. to Public Services and Procurement Canada for $148 million in a deal that’s expected to close in August. Later the same month, Regional Group closed a deal to purchase Export Development Canada’s headquarters at 150 Slater St. from Manulife Investment Management for about $143 million.
Institutional investors have largely shied away from making any big office deals in Ottawa in recent years, Quint noted, opening the door for privately owned firms like his to get in on the action.
“The institutions, even though they say that they're active and they have money to spend, they're not generally pulling the trigger right now,” he said. “I think also probably a lot of them are traumatized by office (transactions) because they had huge office exposure in major towers and millions of square feet that have not gone their way.
“So probably their investment committees just say, as an asset class don't even bring this to me. So for sure it makes room for guys like us, especially in the deal sizes of 50-million-plus, if there's a vacuum of institutional investors. There's not a million private guys that are writing $50-million cheques. So we think that that's going to be an opportunity for us, which is why we're able to get this building.”
In fact, Quint hinted that Brasswater is nearing the finish line on more deals in Ottawa, which he hopes will be finalized in the coming weeks.
“Our pipeline is gigantic,” he said. “We're busy working on a couple things for sure.”
