Healthy offices are about productivity not age

Healthy offices are about productivity not age

Employers are investing heavily in collaborative workplaces because that kind of environment helps attract and retain younger workers. But, ultimately, it’s not about age, it’s about productivity, say officials at two Toronto companies that have made over their headquarters to drive their business strategies.

Toronto Star

Avison Young joins EllisDon’s Carbon Impact Initiative

The EllisDon-backed Carbon Impact Initiative (CII) this week announced real estate services firm Avison Young has signed on as a founding partner. The low-profile CII has a high profile mission: make Canada’s real estate industry a leader in the drive towards a low carbon economy. Considering that commercial real estate plays a major role in carbon emissions, it’s a tall order.

Property Biz Canada

Onex to acquire U.K. based Parkdean Resorts

Onex Corp., Canada’s largest buyout firm, agreed to acquire Parkdean Resorts, a U.K. caravan holiday park operator,  for US$1.69 billion in a deal the buyer expects to be completed in the first quarter of next year.

Financial Post

Oxford Properties sells London, U.K. properties

The real estate arm of Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) has sold a 50% stake in two landmark London offices for roughly £200m (€239m). Oxford Properties, which manages the Canadian pension fund’s real estate investments, sold the interest in the Paternoster Square offices to Madison International Realty.

IPE Real Estate

59-storey highrise proposed for Ottawa’s Bayview Station

Trinity Development’s proposal for its Bayview Station highrises flies a little too close to the sun, concerned residents told the group at a public consultation on Wednesday night. However, the real estate firm said the height is needed to offset the cost of relocating the massive water and sewer pipes that crisscross the site, a feature that’s hindered the efforts of previous owners to develop the property.

Ottawa Business Journal

Rebooting Edmonton’s Century Park

The long-stalled Century Park residential development in South Edmonton looks set to resume, more than a decade after buyers lined up overnight to buy the first condos there. The 42-acre site of the old Heritage Mall, northeast of 23rd Avenue and 111th Street, was originally planned as one of the city’s first transit-oriented developments.

Globe and Mail

Still room and optimism for growth in suburbs

“The death of the suburbs is an untruth in the Canadian marketplace,” said Crombie REIT president and chief executive officer Don Clow early in a panel dubbed “The Facts and Fallacies About the Suburbs” at the Toronto Real Estate Forum.

Property Biz Canada

Partners REIT sells British Columbia property for $12.8 million

Partners REIT (PAR.UN-T) its Washington Park property in Courtenay, British Columbia to Choice Properties REIT (CHP.UN-T). The disposition price for the property is $12.8 million. This valuation represents a gain on the sale of the asset, which is expected to close on December 22, 2016.

Marketwired

Château Vaudreuil rumoured to be sold by Migliorati family

Rumours are flying that the iconic Château Vaudreuil has been sold. As Global’s Tim Sargeant explains, the hotel the Migliorati family opened the hotel in 1989. The Château Vaudreuil hotel has come to symbolize the region of Vaudreuil-Soulange, opening long before the real estate boom took off.

Global News

Feds asked to sell Kingston Pen site for redevelopment

The federal government is being asked to speed up the pace of redevelopment of the land and buildings that once comprised Canada’s most notorious prison. A local group has put forward a $300-million redevelopment plan for Kingston Penitentiary that would see the jail become an elite training centre for Canadian sailors, alongside a new wind power research institute.

Ottawa Business Journal

Walter Hachborn, Home Hardware stores co-founder, dies at 95

Walter Hachborn, co-founder of Home Hardware Stores and member of the Order of Canada, has died, he was 95. Hachborn and two partners started the co-operative for independently owned and operated hardware stores in 1964.

Toronto Star

FDIC sees early signs of stress in CRE lending

It could be that, after hitting 20-year lows, deliquency rates for bank loans on commercial real estate had no where to go but up. Or it could also be an early sign of stress in CRE lending starting to emerge. Either way, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is closely monitoring late payments and other signs of deliquency among loans secured by nonfarm nonresidential properties.

CoStar Group

Blackstone’s Gray on Trump, Real Estate Investing

Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate at Blackstone, discusses his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump and looks at real estate valuations as he sees “no frenzied pace” to sell assets. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker on “Bloomberg Markets: European Close.”

Bloomberg – Bloomberg

GLP ramps up for another $1.5 billion in US investments

Even as it undertakes a strategic review of its worldwide logistics holdings, Global Logistic Properties Ltd. (SGX:MC0), has established a new U.S.-based investment fund: GLP US Income Partners III. The fund is seeded with total equity commitments of $620 million from six leading global institutional investors from Asia, US and Middle East.

CoStar Group

PGGM extends JV to take over French wireless towers

Dutch pension fund manager PGGM has taken over 2,400 telecommunication towers in France, in joint venture with American Tower Corporation. The €200bn investor has extended its partnership with American Tower, a global real estate investment trust (REIT) listed on the New York stock exchange, to buy FPS Towers.

IPE Real Estate

Featured Column

When science fiction becomes science fact

Duncan Stewart, the Director of Telecommunications, Media and Technology at Deloitte, is predicting the future. With a background in science and investment, Duncan forecasts the impacts of technology across a variety of industries, and his message will change your mind.

Read more

Market Trends and Research

No deterrent for prolific illegal hotels in Richmond, B.C.

Several hotels advertised on Chinese-language websites are illegally run out of Vancouver-area houses, each offering several rooms and services that include use of the house as an ongoing personal mailing address for clients to receive Canadian immigration documents and health-care cards. Multiple suites for short-term paying guests are not allowed in single-family homes.

Globe and Mail

BlackBerry to open autonomous vehicle hub in Ottawa

Canada’s BlackBerry Ltd (BB.TO) will open an autonomous driving research center on Monday, as it tries to make itself an indispensable under-the-hood piece of the automotive industry’s weaponry in the self-driving vehicle arms race.

CBC

Consumers – the driving force of growth in 2017: RBC Economics

Canada’s economy regained momentum in the second half of 2016 and is poised to see sustained growth throughout 2017 according to the latest RBC Economic Outlook report. The RBC forecast calls for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of 1.3 per cent in 2016, 1.8 per cent in 2017 and 2.1 per cent in 2018.

Canada Newswire

Dominic Barton, capitalism’s go-to guy

As the head of a consulting company whose work for the corporate elite includes severe “downsizing,” Dominic Barton might strike some as an odd advocate for the economically uprooted. His agency, McKinsey & Co., is the éminence grise of capitalism, so synonymous with blue-chip power that it’s known by that rarefied moniker, The Firm.

Toronto Star

Real Estate Companies

Temple Hotels Inc. closes over-subscribed rights offering

Temple Hotels Inc. (TPH-T) is pleased to announce the successful completion of its previously announced rights offering in each of the provinces and territories of Canada. Upon closing of the Rights Offering, Temple issued 73,866,155 common shares of Temple at a price of $0.6769 per Common Share for aggregate gross proceeds of $50,000,000.

Canada Newswire

REOC Financial Reports

Mainstreet Health Investments Inc. completes bought deal offering

Mainstreet Health Investments Inc. (HLP.U-T) has completed its previously announced offering of US$45,000,000 aggregate principal amount of 5.00% convertible unsecured subordinated debentures of the Company due January 31, 2022.  The Offering was underwritten by a syndicate of underwriters led by National Bank Financial Inc., BMO Capital Markets and CIBC Capital Markets.

Canada Newswire

Restaurants and Eateries

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New Development

Losing Chinatown, bit by bit

Imagine if Chinatown no longer existed. Those shops stacked high with winter melon like mini Zeppelins, heaps of dried mussels and cucumbers, butcher shops with crinkly Chinese sausage dangling from green string and bright pink BBQ pork, ginseng, tea – all of it gone, replaced with chain stores and high-end supermarkets.

Globe and Mail

Conestoga College announces expansion of Waterloo campus

Conestoga College announced a $43.5 million expansion to its north Waterloo campus on Monday, which will begin the first phase of its Pathways to Prosperity initiative.  The expansion means a major renovation for the college’s satellite campus, located at 108 University Ave. E., which will include a new Institute for Culinary & Hospitality Management and other new services.

CBC

Edmonton concrete company major part of construction industry

An Edmonton firm has opened one of North America’s most advanced ready-mix concrete plants to cement its position among the largest privately owned Canadian companies in the field. Rolling Mix Concrete (Edmonton) Ltd.’s west-end facility sits over a 750,000-litre underground reservoir and recycles the water falling on or produced at the 5.5-hectare site.

Edmonton Journal

Sports Venues

Downtown arena drawing business to Edmonton’s inner city

The commercial area northeast of Edmonton’s new Rogers Place arena has seen better days. For-lease signs hang over broken windows and darkened doorways of vacant storefronts. Home to several social-services agencies, the area is a gathering place for people battling addictions, mental health issues and homelessness.

CBC

Infrastructure

Infrastructure boom will be a bumpy ride for investors

Tens of billions of dollars in new highway work, mass transit and other infrastructure proposed by the Trudeau government over the next dozen years should have investors sitting up and taking note. Billions for infrastructure is obviously a boon for construction and engineering stocks, maybe even for larger economic growth and the market as a whole, at least for those with a more Keynesian outlook.

Globe and Mail

The trouble with Canadian airport privatization

There is an irony not lost on us where, as a former Crown Corporation celebrating 30 years of privatization in 2018, Air Canada emerges as distinctly anti-privatization when it comes to Canadian airports – in effect, public facilities that airlines such as Air Canada have invested billions in helping to develop. But it is not inconsistent for us to make this argument.

Globe and Mail

Metrolinx under fire for CN, CP deals

Metrolinx is defending itself against allegations that it may have wasted taxpayers money by not exercising oversight on railroad construction contracts — deals that saw the agency charged excessive mark-ups, invoiced for work it didn’t verify had been performed, and billed for projects on privately owned track that had nothing to do with agency operations.

Toronto Star

Industry leaders applaud approval of Tory’s toll plan

Now that Toronto Mayor John Tory’s toll plan for the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway (DVP) has been given the green light by council, members of the construction industry state they are eager to see what comes next, with several in strong support of the idea.

Daily Commercial News

Other

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