Toronto-based Crown Realty Partners announced this week it has taken over management of Minto Place effective July 1.
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One of Ottawa’s largest office complexes is poised for a major renovation under a new management team that wants the downtown property to keep up with other class-A buildings that have received makeovers in recent years.
Toronto-based Crown Realty Partners announced this week it has taken over management of Minto Place effective July 1. The three-building complex, which is bordered by Laurier Avenue West as well as Kent, Slater and Lyon streets, includes about 950,000 square feet of leasable retail and office space.
“We’re excited to do what we do best — take over office properties, reinvigorate them and improve leasing at them,” Crown Realty managing partner Scott Watson told OBJ on Monday. “That’s what the owners have kind of entrusted us to give advice on … and get it back to being best-in-class in the marketplace.”
Minto Group, Mackenzie Investments and LaSalle Investment Management each hold a one-third interest in the complex. Colliers will continue to lead leasing efforts at the marquee downtown property, which currently has five empty floors covering a total of about 100,000 square feet.
Top-tier downtown office and retail properties such as the World Exchange Plaza, Constitution Square and the Sun Life Financial Centre have all been spruced up in recent years with redesigned food courts, common spaces and other amenities designed to lure tenants who are keen to upgrade their workspaces as employees return to the office.
Now, Watson said, it’s Minto Place’s turn to be modernized in a bid to cash in on the “flight to quality” that’s become the hallmark of downtown Ottawa’s office leasing market.
“Most downtown complexes have had a major overhaul in the last five years,” he explained. “Minto is next to go to get some cosmetic work to bring it up to today’s standards.”
Minto Place was constructed in phases, with the 14-storey Enterprise Building on Laurier Avenue and the 18-storey Canada Building both completed in 1988. The 19-storey office tower at 180 Kent St., which houses Minto Group’s headquarters, opened in 2009.
Crown Realty’s first order of business will be refurbishing the main office tower at 180 Kent St. The building's fitness centre was recently upgraded and a new conference centre was added last year, but Watson said Crown plans to work with the owners to renovate the main lobby and continue other modernization efforts on upper floors.
“We’ve got some cool plans and ideas that we’ve started to work on,” he said, adding it’s “a bit premature” to release details or offer an estimated price tag for the proposed upgrades.
Watson said renderings of the new-look lobby and other changes should be ready by the end of this year, with work expected to get underway in the first half of 2027.
Besides the real estate firm for which the complex is named, Minto Place’s other tenants include federal departments such as Infrastructure Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency and the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, as well as major law firm Soloway Wright and professional services giant BDO Canada.
Lindsay Hockey, a vice-president at Colliers who handles leasing for the complex, told OBJ earlier this year that Minto Place’s vacancies are drawing strong interest from private-sector companies. Hockey said he also sees opportunities for the feds to help backfill some of the empty floor space.
“What better way to deal with a significant amount of vacancy than if you can convince the feds to look at your building?” he added. “We’re trying.”
Watson said the modernized Minto Place will be designed to appeal to a broad mix of tenants, including tech companies and other private-sector firms as well as the federal government.
“The sooner you do (the renovations), the sooner you get the results,” he said.
With most federal government managers already back in the office four days a week for the past few months and most other employees following suit as of July 6, Watson said downtown Ottawa is poised for a revival.
He believes Minto Place is “the right setting” for organizations looking to be close to the action.
“I think the (increase in) defence spending is definitely going to help,” he added. “The technology sector is back. It’s all good things, and those things typically happen downtown. In Ottawa, they specifically happen close to Parliament.”
The addition of Minto Place to its management portfolio means Crown Realty now owns or manages about 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate in the National Capital Region. Its local holdings include a 50 per cent stake in Place de Ville and full ownership of the four-building Park of Commerce in Gloucester.
The new contract to manage Minto Place comes a month after the firm sold another well-known office complex, the Carling Executive Centre, to Montreal-based Brasswater for $53 million.
Crown Realty bought the three-building, 290,000-square-foot property at 1525, 1545 and 1565 Carling Ave. from QuadReal Property Group for $56.5 million in 2019. It was the firm’s first transaction in the Ottawa market.
Crown acquired the property “with a specific plan,” managing partner Emily Hanna wrote in an email to OBJ this week.
The firm wanted to “reposition the asset through targeted capital investment and an active leasing program” aimed at boosting its occupancy, she said.
“We did just that, investing in the onsite amenities and improving the tenant experience, which ultimately drove occupancy, rents, and income, even throughout the shock of COVID.”
Hanna would not comment on whether Crown has any other sales or acquisitions in its Ottawa pipeline, saying only that the company evaluates opportunities in the region “the same way we look at those in any of our target markets: we look asset by asset where we can acquire where pricing makes sense and devise an asset strategy that will lead to us driving improvements in income, occupancy and value.
“Similarly, in line with our investment thesis, we plan to sell assets wherever we've completed our value-add work,” she added.
