Maritime-Ontario Freight Lines has leased a 359K SF fulfillment centre at 8495 Goreway Drive in Brampton, one of the first industrial transactions of its kind for the Toronto market.
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Toronto has not seen much in the way of fulfillment centres, facilities where goods, mostly e-commerce-related, flow through to their destinations versus being stored, as per a traditional distribution centre/warehouse building.
Colliers associate vice president Matt Jones, who co-brokered the deal with executive vice president Gord Cook, said this is one of the GTA’s first significant leasing transactions involving a fulfillment centre.
Formerly occupied by Costco, the building has 155K SF of cooler space, 194K SF of ambient storage, and copious trailer parking within a fully secured compound, making it turnkey-ready for Maritime-Ontario's occupancy.
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The facility, on a 30-acre site, is owned by Rice Commercial, which tapped Colliers to help relocate Costco to 8862 Highway 27 in Vaughan. (The retailer's new distribution centre is designed to strengthen its capacity to serve markets in eastern Canada.)
Rice selected Cook and Jones to market the facility, and they began seeking groups to replace Costco at 8495 Goreway last summer.
“Not every tenant would want a building this size and with its particular attributes, such as its cooler space, so we had to be specific in the prospective tenants we targetted,” Jones said.
Maritime-Ontario, which is growing rapidly and expanding its cold chain division, was a good fit.
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This is not the only big deal this year for the Colliers duo. They just closed on the $22M sale of Banty’s Roost Golf & Country Club in Caledon to Anatolia Investments Group, the real estate arm of Anatolia Tile & Stone, one of the world’s largest tile importers.
Land is a highly sought-after asset class these days across the GTA, and Jones said the 187-acre golf course, originally acquired via a bankruptcy sale, and zoned for agriculture, generated strong interest from private capital sources, residential and commercial builders, land developers and investors, as well as from institutions.
“Land is a hot commodity,” he said.
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