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Toronto FC got its season off on the right foot, with big buck signing Jermain Defoe launching his MLS career in style with two goals in a win over Seattle. But news about BMO Field almost stole the headline.  Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment CEO Tim Leiweke confirmed that MLSE is going to spend $120M on upgrades to BMO Field, which has been approved by the Exhibition Place board of governors, the Toronto Sun reports. Municipal, provincial, and federal governments are kicking in $10M each, but that will be paid back. The CFL's Argos would conceivably move in there once their lease expires at the Rogers Centre in 2017, and MLSE is pitching to host the 2018 Winter Classic there—part of a festival to help celebrate the Leafs' 100th anniversary. BMO would seat 30,000 for soccer and 25,000 for football, with room to add another 10,000 seats. (Submit your conspiracy theories about what happened to those 5,000 missing soccer fans.) The renovation will be completed in May 2016.  The BMO expansion is going to be a real boon for the community, First Capital Realty president Dori Segal tells us. LV-based First Capital owns, develops, and manages urban retail-centred properties and was outspoken in its opposition to a planned casino for CNE grounds last fall. In the end, Dori says it spent “north of a million” over three months mounting an attack on the casino, bringing economists, lobbyists, legal folks, and professional planners on board. “We are business people,” he says. “We would have supported it if we thought it was good.”  While concrete research is still forthcoming, his gut tells him that anything that has a “clean, healthy sporting connotation to it” wouldn't be bad for the neighbourhood. As Dori (snapped above with Rose Corp's Sam Reisman) points out, people who go to TFC games would stop by the many restaurants and pubs popping up in Liberty Village (like the just-announced B.C.-based Joey Restaurant Group, a pub-style restaurant, taking the old Origin restaurant space at the corner of Hanna Avenue and East Liberty). |
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The Latest From Peter Street One of the more bustling development stretches is Peter Street/Blue Jays Way. So we took a stroll this week to see the latest, starting with Allied's QRC West building, which'll total 395k SF over two construction phases. Occupancy for Phase 1 is Q4 '14; the big news out of that camp yesterday was that international entertainment company Entertainment One will be the mystery tenant we reported on in late February.  Entertainment One will set up its head office there in a “substantial commitment," according to Allied CEO Michael Emory—70k SF for 13 years, starting in June 2015, over four contiguous floors. Jake Gyllenhaal stars in the one of the current films it's distributing—Denis Villeneuve's Enemy. (Make sure that BID gets insurance. His films often end with entire cities being destroyed.)  Another project on the stretch well into construction is the 41-storey Bisha Hotel and Residences at 56 Blue Jays Way. Lifetime Developments VP Brian Brown tells us that the firm has completed the excavation and has commenced work on the underground garage. Its tentative occupancy is late 2016. He says the size, scale, and architecture of the buildings under construction along Peter “are world class…each will have a such a dramatic impression on the fabric of the city.”  Tableau Condominiums (which will have an office component) and CentreCourt Developments' Peter Street Condominiums (mixed-use, with retail along the base) are also in various stages of construction. CentreCourt VP Shamez Virani says it's on the 28th level and on pace to finish in December. Starbucks has signed a lease for the corner retail space, and the Toronto Arts Council will be taking retail space facing Peter Street. |
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Call for Real Estate's
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New Bisnow Education VideoBy popular demand, we've just released a second video we did with Peter Linneman, widely considered the top professor of commercial real estate in the US. This new video is called "Real Estate Finance," i.e., on how you get money to do deals. Although an advanced topic, it's purposely very simple to understand. It's 77 minutes, broken into 5-minute increments, so you can watch or listen as you are waiting in line, or at the gym, or lying in bed. (To each his own.) Click here for the new video and here for the old video. |
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