BlackBerry Portfolio Sale Drives Waterloo’s Blockbuster Year
Waterloo Region had a doozy of a year in 2014, with a record $1B-plus in deals, a significant proportion coming from the sale of BlackBerry's building portfolio to San Francisco-based Spear Street Capital. And Colliers’ Karl Innanen tells us the momentum shows no signs of letting up.
That $1B in investment sales is a “huge rise off our average year,” explains Karl, Colliers' Waterloo Region managing director, noting that the office sector alone accounted for $470M of the deals, more than the seven previous years combined. Two transactions made up the bulk of the activity: Concert Real Estate paid $147M for the 745k SF Sun Life building (seen below) and the financial services company is leasing that tower back; and Spear Street shelled out about $305M for BlackBerry’s Canadian portfolio, with 13 buildings in Waterloo.
Local commercial real estate pros had been pondering for years what would happen if BlackBerry were to contract, Karl says. “They’d been elbowing people out for so long,” including Google, which moved to downtown Kitchener owing to a lack of options in Waterloo (at its peak BlackBerry owned 2M SF of the total 5M SF of office space in Waterloo Region). Now, with the company’s portfolio having been acquired, Karl says, tenants are rushing to fill the vacuum, snapping up buildings on the doorstep of University of Waterloo and its deep pool of tech talent.
Spear Street sold six of the 13 properties it acquired within eight months, including 560 Westmount Rd (seen above), purchased by BlackBerry founder Michael Lazaridis to serve as the HQ for his firm, Quantum Valley Investments. And Michael Wekerle, of Dragons’ Den fame, bought five of the buildings to house his Waterloo Innovation Network, three of which are right across the street from the university. “His goal is to attract startups,” says Karl. "He may even take a trade of equity position for rent.”
Spear Street is in the midst of retrofitting/renovating 450 Phillips St—a 250k SF ho-hum looking “pseudo-industrial” building where BlackBerry devices were manufactured—into a “funky cool” office space, notes Karl. While the BlackBerry portfolio sale created a huge vacancy void, the buildings remaining for sale offer larger floor plates than what’s available in Kitchener, where many tech firms headed after Google set up shop there. “They’re great opportunities for companies that want to get efficient and be on one floor,” Karl says, adding he’s not fretting the prospect of long-term vacancies. “These are sought-after locations and buildings.”
