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.”
