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Ottawa poised for post-election surge in commercial real estate investment, broker says

April 14, 2025

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A top executive at one of the city’s largest commercial real estate brokerages says he expects Ottawa’s investment market to continue gaining momentum – especially once the dust settles after the April 28 federal election. “From an Ottawa standpoint, there’s a lot that doesn’t happen during an election period,” Scott Brooker, a vice-president at Cushman & Wakefield Ottawa, told OBJ in a recent interview. Brooker said he thinks more deals will start to flow through the pipeline in the second and third quarters of what’s already been a busy 2025 for the sector. “I think post-election activity will pick up.” After a surge of transactions in 2021 and 2022, Ottawa’s real estate investment market cooled off over the next two years as high interest rates and rising inflation dampened buyers’ enthusiasm. While U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff campaign has left global financial markets reeling, Brooker said he doesn’t see much evidence that the trade war is prompting investors to have second thoughts about entering the Ottawa market. “I think from an investment standpoint, we’ll continue to see velocity and volume pick up,” he explained. “I’m not going to say that we’re going to get to 2022 or 2021 volumes, but I think we’re going to be a lot closer to our average historical volumes in 2025. “Private-equity investors have been extremely active, and I don’t see that changing. Private equity I think will still be the big story for ’25, but we’ll start to see those institutional and semi-institutional investors be more active in ’25, both in Ottawa and across the country.” Ottawa’s office investment market had a particularly sluggish 2024, accounting for just two of the city’s top 10 transactions. Michael Pyman, Colliers’ Ottawa-based vice-president of national investment services, told OBJ in February that many large institutional investors remain wary of expanding their office portfolios. “There’s just so much uncertainty in (the office market),” he said. “The bigger pension funds and real estate investment trusts are kind of shying away from that space. There’s just too many headwinds in that market with back-to-work strategies still being uncertain.” But Brooker sounded slightly more bullish last week, saying the sector could be poised for a revival as tenants snap up more vacant space, especially in the suburbs. “I think if you look at the meat of the market, some of the smaller deals – office buildings that are 20, 30, 40, 50,000 square feet – we’re seeing a lot more of those transactions,” he added. “I think that will continue to work its way up the chain. I think overall there’s momentum in that office investment market. “Certainly, the metrics have shifted from where they were in 2020, 2021, but I think that overall we’ve seen a strengthening of the office leasing market and stabilization from a leasing standpoint. As groups adjust to the new investment metrics, I think that there’s a little bit more confidence that, ‘OK, we can start to trade these assets again.’” Meanwhile, retail properties continue to be red-hot. Brooker said demand for “high-traffic, urban retail” plazas isn’t slowing down as little new supply has entered the market in the past few years, leaving investors scrambling to snap up grocery-anchored neighbourhood malls like the Avalon Centre in Orléans, which was acquired late last year by Choice Properties REIT for nearly $32 million. “It’s a very sought-after asset class,” Brooker noted. “Depending on your investment thesis for the property when you bought it, where you are in your investment cycle, if it’s something that you would be looking to dispose of in the next number of years, you’re probably looking at the market going, ‘Now is probably a pretty good time if I am going to sell this.” Cushman & Wakefield just put a retail complex across from Lansdowne Park on the market. Bookended by a Tim Hortons and The Beer Store, the 17,000-square-foot strip located on the ground floor of a retirement residence at 900 Bank St. is fully leased to six tenants, with a weighted average lease term of 11.8 years. Pointing to Ottawa’s “very strong fundamentals for retail” such as a stable economy and a relatively affluent population, Brooker said such properties typically garner plenty of bids. “We expect we’ll get interest across the buyer spectrum. It really opens up the doors to almost any investor. I fully expect we’ll see everything from private equity through to some smaller institutional-style investors.” Cushman & Wakefield also brokered Ottawa’s biggest retail transaction of 2024, the $73.5-million sale of the Carlingwood Shopping Centre from the Ontario Pension Board to Streamliner Properties and Anthem Properties Group. The new owners told OBJ last month it’s still “business as usual” for the 630,000-square-foot mall in Ottawa’s west end. But they hinted last spring there would eventually be residential development at the 30-acre site, saying its proximity to a major arterial road and an LRT station makes it a “prime location for much-needed incremental residential density.” Brooker said while it’s still too early to speculate on what the new owners will do with the site, it’s a good bet that any future construction projects at Carlingwood will include a housing component. “I would not be surprised at some point down the road to see some form of residential (development occur) on that site,” he said.