Insider Only Real Estate

Colonnade BridgePort taps real estate veteran Andrew Blair to head fund management business

April 24, 2023

In his new role, the Ottawa native will be in charge of securing partnership deals with the kind of deep-pocketed backers – including high-net-worth individuals, family offices and institutional investors – that can help fund Colonnade BridgePort’s next wave of multi-residential and industrial development proposals.

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As it embarks on a series of high-profile residential and industrial construction projects, Ottawa’s Colonnade BridgePort has hired veteran real estate executive Andrew Blair to attract well-heeled investors that can help finance its ambitious agenda. The firm said Monday it has tapped Blair – who spent decades in senior management roles at enterprises ranging from multinational developers to one of Canada’s biggest pension funds – to become managing partner of its new investment and fund management business. In his new role, the Ottawa native will be in charge of securing partnership deals with the kind of deep-pocketed backers – including high-net-worth individuals, family offices and institutional investors – that can help fund Colonnade BridgePort’s next wave of multi-residential and industrial development proposals. It’s another step in the evolution of the firm’s investment business, which has been working with institutional investors on a “transaction-by-transaction basis” up to now, Colonnade BridgePort chief executive Hugh Gorman told OBJ on Monday. With a spate of major projects in the firm’s development pipeline, management felt it was time to “formalize” its private equity and fund management business by creating a fund and putting the “right team in place,” Gorman explained. The CEO said his new colleague brings “an entrepreneurial approach to real estate” and a thorough understanding of capital markets to the job. “We just felt like Andrew was the right combination,” he said. Indeed, Blair brings an eclectic background to his new post. After earning law degrees from Queen’s University and the University of Cambridge, he spent more than a decade practising law in Toronto before shifting his attention to real estate. Blair served as senior vice-president and chief operating officer at publicly traded real estate colossus TrizecHahn for nearly six years before leaving the firm in 2002. He briefly held the same roles at real estate firm MI Developments before taking the helm of Toronto-based StorageNow Holdings, a private equity-backed self-storage company he helped build into a national enterprise over the next two years. In 2007, he joined the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, one of the world’s largest investors in private equity, as head of real estate investments for the Americas. From 2011-18, Blair was president and CEO of Parkbridge Lifestyle Communities, one of Canada’s largest owners and operators of land-lease communities. Since 2019, he has led his own real estate consulting firm, GSD Consulting. Now “a bit north of 60,” Blair said the opportunity to work with a growing real estate firm in the city where he grew up was too good to turn down. “I think Ottawa is clearly an under-recognized market as a destination for real estate investment capital,” he said, pointing to the “long-term stability” of the local market and the capital’s high quality of life as key attributes for investors. “The opportunity to do something this interesting in my hometown at this stage of my career is very gratifying.” Ottawa’s largest privately owned landlord, Colonnade BridgePort manages more than 9.3 million square feet of property. The firm has been making headlines lately for high-profile deals such as its recent acquisition of an office complex at City Park Drive and its proposal for a 900,000-square-foot industrial park in Barrhaven in conjunction with Toronto’s CanFirst Capital. But Blair and Gorman say the prime focus of the new fund will be large-scale multi-residential development. With rental vacancy rates hovering around two per cent in the capital region, they say demand for good-quality rental housing has never been higher – and even last year’s spike in apartment starts hasn’t been enough to satisfy the growing need. “That demand curve is continuing to steepen,” Gorman said. “Our view is, in the not-too-distant future we’re going to see both equity and debt start flowing back into the market.” Colonnade BridgePort has a number of residential developments in the works, including a rental tower at the site of the former Granite Curling Club on Scott Street in Westboro and mixed-use highrises at Pickering Place, east of the Ottawa train station and the Tremblay LRT terminal. Blair agreed that Ottawa is currently suffering a “significant imbalance between supply and demand” in rental housing. He said the new fund will help trigger new investment in the sector by offering backers a diversified mix of projects, generating a “multiplier effect” for their equity. “The investment dynamics in multi-family right now are just extraordinary,” Blair said. “Hugh and his colleagues put together a pipeline of development projects on an incredible scale and calibre that frankly the Ottawa market hasn’t seen in the past. That allows our investors to have a meaningful interest in multiple projects and benefit from the larger-scale equity that an institution can (invest) alongside us.”