SmartCentres

SmartCentres is a Canadian real estate investment trust based in Vaughan. It was founded by Mitchell Goldhar with the aim of making retail more convenient and affordable in Canada.

Its defining move came in 1994, when it helped Walmart enter the Canadian market. It opened its first Walmart in Barrie, Ontario, went on to develop 176 Walmart stores across Canada, and formed a joint venture with the retailer. It remains Walmart’s only real estate development partner anywhere in the world.

Because of what it already owns. Decades of building shopping centres left SmartCentres holding large, well-located, low-density sites across every Canadian province, most of them on major roads with transit and parking already in place.

Those sites are worth far more as mixed-use communities than as single-storey retail with a parking field. Converting them is the whole strategy.

For a buyer this has a real advantage: the retail, the roads and often the transit already exist. You are not waiting a decade for the amenities to arrive, because the shopping centre was there first.

SmartCentres’ publicly announced $14.9 billion transformation plan. The company is developing holistic master-plans for every property in its portfolio, covering rental apartments, condominiums, townhomes, seniors’ residences, self-storage, offices, retail, hotels and industrial.

The scale is unusual: this is not a plan for a handful of sites but for the whole portfolio, executed by an in-house development team.

Across a wider range than almost any other name on this list: condominiums, purpose-built rental apartments, townhomes, seniors’ residences, self-storage, office, retail, hotels and industrial.

Their best known GTA residential work sits at SmartVMC in Vaughan, the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, which is a full mixed-use downtown built on former retail land at a subway station.

Ask what else is planned on the same site and when. These are master-plans covering entire properties, so the building next to yours is probably already designed, and you should know what it is before you commit.

Check whether the existing retail is staying, changing or being replaced. Part of the appeal is amenity that already exists, so confirm it is not the thing being demolished in phase two.

Then the usual: deposit schedule, maintenance fee estimate and its basis, what is standard rather than an upgrade, parking and locker, and the occupancy and registration timeline.