Industrial Market Heats Up

Matt worked with the buyer of the property (North Construction) in the deal—378 East Esplanade in North Vancouver. North Construction will gut the property and use it primarily as its new head office operation. “The buyer was desperate to find something new, and with the market as tight as it is, unless you wanted a strata property, you couldn't find a property like this,” he tells us. Matt started working with North Construction two years ago, looking for a property to buy, but couldn't find property available for sale. “It's hard to find anyone interested in selling. So we knocked on doors, to try and pry something loose,” he says. (You've heard of door-to-door salesmen, he's a door-to-door buyer.) That's what it has come to. Fortunately, after a lot of knocking, they found an owner who agreed on a price. But the experience was a reminder, he says, of the challenges in the market overall these days.

It's the largest office transaction in Burnaby since last summer, RealNet's Ryan Wyse says. (Temps rise and so do prices.) Marlborough Court, a five-storey office building at Marlborough Avenue and Kingsway, sold to a private investor for $27.2M. The building sits next to Metropolis at Metrotown Mall, and is 83k SF, with large floor plates.

With outlet centres now one of the hottest sectors of commercial real estate in Canada, Avison Young has added two specialists in the area as principals—Lisa Quier Wagner and David Hinkle—to focus on outlet centre strategic direction, marketing and management, as well as providing leading guidance and tenant advisory expertise. (We need to hire someone to help us stay out of the outlet stores before our credit card melts.) In an interview with Bisnow, Lisa and David—with a combined 50 years of commercial real estate experience—both acknowledged the growth potential for more outlet centres across Canada, but Vancouver has its challenges.

“It is difficult to acquire land at a price that works for outlet,” Lisa says. Her former firm, McArthurGlen, is building an outlet centre next to Vancouver Airport. There is an opportunity for another site, closer to Whistler. “Tourism-oriented sites [geared more at vacationing customers] have been very successful outlet projects,” she says. Lisa and David most recently served as partners of the US-based Outlet Resource Group, a specialty retail consultancy firm, which they co-owned and co-founded. Both say through the years they have acquired extensive knowledge of how the outlet industry has evolved in Canada. The industry is “really starting its maturation process,” Lisa says.