Minto has sold 34 buildings containing more than 800 residential units to a joint venture in one of the largest multi-family real estate transactions in recent Ottawa history. Real estate investment firm Woodland Capital and property developer Forum acquired the 826-unit Parkwood Hills portfolio from Minto in a deal that closed on Tuesday. It’s the […]
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Minto has sold 34 buildings containing more than 800 residential units to a joint venture in one of the largest multi-family real estate transactions in recent Ottawa history.
Real estate investment firm Woodland Capital and property developer Forum acquired the 826-unit Parkwood Hills portfolio from Minto in a deal that closed on Tuesday. It’s the largest acquisition to date for Woodland Capital, which is based in Montreal, and Forum, which has offices in Edmonton, Burlington and Westmount, Que.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Located in Ottawa's Parkwood Hills neighbourhood at Meadowlands Drive and Fisher Avenue, the 34-building portfolio occupies nearly 26 acres of land and includes concrete mid-rise rental apartment buildings, low-rise walk-ups and townhomes totalling about 800,000 square feet.
“It’s pretty much exactly what we look for,” Woodland Capital’s director of acquisitions, Zachary Burak, told OBJ in an interview on Thursday afternoon.
“The fundamentals are great. It’s a difficult market to enter in Ottawa. It’s largely insular, and we would never be able to assemble a portfolio like this one by one. It really gave us an opportunity to buy scale, and the timing was great.”
Forum and Minto officials did not immediately reply to requests for comment on Thursday.
The deal marks Woodland Capital’s first acquisition of a property outside of Quebec. Burak said the company has been trying to gain a foothold in Ottawa for some time.
“We like the similarities that it has with the Quebec market,” he said. “It’s the closest major market to our home base in Montreal. It has a strong employment base, strong (post-)secondary institutions, and it offers a good quality of life.”
The portfolio features one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments as well as two- and three-bedroom townhomes catering to a “wide range” of users, including young and established professionals, students and families, Burak added.
“The properties are performing very well,” he said. “There is very limited vacancy.”
It’s also the first time Woodland Capital and Forum have teamed up to buy properties together. Forum has a “national reach” and a “little bit more depth on their operating platform,” Burak explained.
“We just thought it made a lot of sense as we entered into a new market for our largest transaction to partner up with a group like Forum. We’ve been speaking with them for some time about various opportunities, and this one clicked.”
Historic acquisition
In addition to being the biggest acquisition in either firm’s history, the deal dwarfs any multi-residential sale in recent Ottawa history in terms of the number of units involved.
According to Colliers, the largest number of units that previously changed hands in an Ottawa rental apartment transaction since 2024 was 258, when Lankin Investments acquired the 23-storey Riversides apartment complex on Lycée Place from GWL Realty Advisors for $72 million earlier this year.
The most valuable apartment sale during that period was Capreit’s $78.5-million acquisition of the 144-unit Nuovo Apartment at 518 Rochester St. from RealStar Group for $78.5 million in 2024.
Other significant multi-unit transactions in recent years include Forum Asset Management’s $183-million purchase of 579 student apartments at 256 Rideau St. and 211 Besserer St. from Choo Communities for $183 million in 2024, and Ottawa Community Housing’s $86-million deal to buy 311 affordable housing units on Woodfield and Chesterton Drives from Minto Group, also in 2024.
Burak said Woodland Capital is looking at other properties in the Ottawa region.
“There are a couple of things in the works,” he said. “We like the market. I think the problem is finding good opportunities. If good opportunities come our way, we’ll take them seriously.”
Also Thursday, Ottawa Community Housing announced it has acquired 503 rental homes from Minto in what it described as the largest transaction in the organization’s history.
OCH said the deal “ranks among the top non-profit affordable housing acquisitions in Canada.”
The landmark purchase includes 73 townhouse blocks with a total of 369 townhomes as well as two apartment buildings containing 134 units. Located in the South Centrepoint neighbourhood of Nepean, the units were built between the early 1970s and mid-1980s, OCH said in a news release.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
