InterRent eyes 2025 completion for Laurier Avenue office-to-residential conversion project

February 25, 2025

InterRent REIT says construction of 139 rental apartment units and 1,736 square feet of ground-floor commercial space in the Narono Building at 360 Laurier Ave. W. is “well underway.”

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A major project to convert a former government office building on Laurier Avenue into a rental apartment complex is on pace to be completed later this year, the company in charge of managing and leasing the property says. InterRent REIT says construction of 139 rental apartment units and 1,736 square feet of ground-floor commercial space in the Narono Building at 360 Laurier Ave. W. is “well underway.” In its 2024 annual report released this week, the Ottawa-based real estate investment trust says demolition of the 57-year-old building’s interior is 95 per cent complete. InterRent says “the majority of the work at the site has been tendered and awarded,” with completion of the project targeted for the third quarter of 2025. InterRent, CLV Group – the REIT’s sister company which specializes in real estate development – and two institutional investors purchased the 11-storey, 107,000-square-foot office building from True North Commercial REIT for $17.5 million in 2023. The Correctional Service of Canada previously occupied more than 100,000 square feet of space in the building, but the federal government did not renew its lease and the agency moved out early in 2023. It’s the second major office-to-residential conversion project for CLV Group, which also redeveloped another former government office, the 11-storey Trebla Building at 473 Albert St., into a 158-unit apartment complex. InterRent, which also manages that property, known as The Slayte, said the final 17 units at the Albert Street apartment complex were brought to market last year. As the housing crisis mounts, CLV and InterRent have become major players in a growing move to turn excess office real estate in downtown Ottawa into residential apartments. Other developers, including KTS Properties and District Realty, are also planning to convert aging office properties in the core into residential projects. Still, office-to-residential conversions aren’t for the faint of heart. The process of gutting a building’s interior, redesigning it and installing all the plumbing and electrical infrastructure required for residential use is complex and expensive, and many buildings don’t fit the size and shape requirements to be repurposed as apartment complexes. CLV Group president Oz Drewniak told OBJ two years ago the Narono Building is “as close to ideal” a candidate for a residential conversion as the company has found in Ottawa, explaining that it’s the right shape and its floorplate is compact enough to allow natural light to fill the units. “If it’s too deep from the core to the wall, you have super-deep units and it’s hard to design those units,” Drewniak said. “This is kind of like a slab-style building where it’s rectangular in nature. It’s not perfectly ideal, but it’s close.” InterRent owns and manages more than 13,000 rental suites, with most of its properties concentrated in the Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver areas. The REIT has two other projects in its development pipeline in the National Capital Region – a 177-suite mixed-use complex with more than 11,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space at the corner of Richmond Road and Churchill Avenue in Westboro, and a massive multi-tower proposal at 900 Albert St. near LeBreton Flats that would include more than 1,200 apartments and nearly 600,000 square feet of retail space. Planning on those projects is still “progressing,” the REIT said in its latest report, but neither proposal has a targeted completion date.