One of the city’s largest commercial landlords has added 243,000 square feet of industrial space to its portfolio with the purchase of a recently constructed Gloucester property.
Morguard said Wednesday that it bought the Capital East Business Centre in the Canotek Business Park, near the Montreal Road and Highway 174 interchange, for $42.5 million. Brokerage firm CBRE Ottawa represented the vendor in the transaction, the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan.
The small-bay, light-industrial property was built in two phases by HOOPP.
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Phase one was finished in 2010. The 121,100-square-foot second phase at 1101 Polytek St. was still vacant when it was completed in the fourth quarter of 2014. However, the building was fully leased 18 months later “at above-market rates,” Warren Wilkinson, the managing director of Colliers International’s Ottawa office, told OBJ in 2016.
Sleep Country Canada was one of the firms that helped to fill the space, leasing 26,000 square feet in the second quarter of 2016, brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield Ottawa reported at the time.
Morguard says the 15.5-acre property was particularly attractive because Ottawa lacks attractively located industrial development land inside the Greenbelt, which limits the amount of new supply that can be brought to market.
“The Capital East Business Centre is the best multi-tenant industrial facility in the Ottawa region,” said Morguard CEO and chairman K. Rai Sahi. “Acquisition opportunities like (this) do not come up often.”
Morguard now owns or manages some 4.8 million square feet of commercial space in Ottawa.
