‘We don’t like to be idle’: Avenue 31 bullish on growing industrial development pipeline

January 27, 2025

As his firm wraps up the second phase of a major industrial park in Ottawa’s east end, Avenue 31 Capital’s director of business development says 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year for the fast-growing real estate firm. “Everyone’s working hard,” Ryan Semple told OBJ in a recent interview. “We don’t like to […]

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As his firm wraps up the second phase of a major industrial park in Ottawa’s east end, Avenue 31 Capital's director of business development says 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year for the fast-growing real estate firm. “Everyone’s working hard,” Ryan Semple told OBJ in a recent interview. “We don’t like to be idle.” With some 850 acres of development land in its pipeline, Avenue 31 has a lot on its plate. Its biggest current project is the National Capital Business Park. Located on 99 acres of National Capital Commission-owned land near the corner of Highway 417 and Hunt Club Road, the site is home to three buildings covering more than 440,000 square feet of class-A industrial space. Avenue 31 and its construction partners – which include main contractor VCL Construction, the Tomlinson Group and architecture firm Ware Malcomb – are working on the latest addition to the park, a 202,000-square-foot building that’s expected to be completed before the end of the year. About 60 per cent of the space now under construction has already been pre-leased to a tenant that’s yet to be publicly named. Meanwhile, the park’s existing buildings are almost 90 per cent occupied, with a tenant list that includes household names such as FedEx, Pizza Pizza and Red Bull. Semple said Avenue 31 originally hoped to break ground on the building a year earlier but opted to keep its shovels in neutral as rising interest rates and soaring inflation sent a chill through the development industry and kept potential tenants on the sidelines. “No one really wanted to make a decision,” he explained. “We don’t want to be building a building if no one wants to be leasing it. We didn’t need to take on that risk, so we waited for the market to stabilize. It has, and so now we’re back to work.” The site still has room for up to half a million square feet of additional density. Three more buildings will likely be added to the site over the next few years, Semple said. A few kilometres to the south, Avenue 31 is poised to break ground on its next project in the National Capital Region. Part of a 38-acre site Avenue 31 purchased in 2018, the Thunder Road Industrial Park is located on Boundary Road near Highway 417, just across from Amazon’s one-million-square-foot fulfilment centre. Avenue 31 plans to start construction at the park this spring on a secure storage lot and 10,000-square-foot office for IAA (Impact Auto Auctions) Inc., which was acquired in 2023 by publicly traded industry giant Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers and bills itself as Canada’s largest live online auto auction service. The site is expected to be ready for occupancy by Oct. 1. “They love the location,” Semple says of IAA, which has signed a 20-year lease on the property. Across town in Barrhaven, Avenue 31 has longer-term plans to capitalize on a prime industrial site a stone’s-throw from Amazon’s other massive warehouse in the National Capital Region. The High Rock Logistics Park, a 30-acre property on Fallowfield Road between Moodie Drive and Highway 416, is still in the planning stages and will be developed in the coming years, Semple explained. Avenue 31 is one of the few developers that has active industrial construction projects underway in the National Capital Region. While Ottawa continues to be one of the country’s tightest markets with an overall vacancy rate of about two per cent, macroeconomic factors such as inflation and rising interest rates made builders wary to launch new projects. But Semple says he’s “pretty bullish” about the future as rate cuts make the investment climate more favourable and Ottawa continues to be a sought-after market for logistics customers and other big users of industrial space. “The Ottawa market is typically a little bit different. We don’t see the same peaks and valleys that you would see in larger markets like Toronto or Montreal.”