by 604 City

By Paul Brent

Toronto-based Allied Properties REIT (AP.UN) just capped off a strong 2013 financial year and is not afraid to tell investors even better times are ahead. That positive message came out in a recent conference call Allied had with investors and analysts and the theme was picked up in an interview by the REIT’s president and CEO, Michael Emory (shown in image from the company website).

“It was a great year, a great quarter, and maybe even more importantly, we felt that we set a very good foundation for a very good year in 2014 and 2015,” Emory said, “to the extent that you can predict the future.”

What has changed?

After rates spiked and REITs stalled in May, the market for properties Allied is interested in have slowly and steadily recovered, meaning acquisition opportunities may be more abundant in the near term than initially expected.

Last year’s market retreat “led us to the preliminary conclusion that acquisitions may slow down. Not because we didn’t have a very favourable cost of equity and cost of debt, even after this event, but because we felt the vendors would lose some momentum and some readiness to sell,” Emory said.

“We did …read more

Source: RENX

The office building is now topped out.

Photo taken April 8, 2014 by 604 City.

By ChangingCity

The mystery was that as far as we knew there wasn’t either a rezoning or development application submitted, although the building was being marketed. The design by Musson Cattell Mackey initially was for a 9-storey building with 77,000 sq ft of space (right).

Now there’s a development application, it’s a 10 storey building, and the design has evolved into something that looks really much more interesting. Our image shows the view down Seymour, looking north. There are angled glazed sections in the Seymour facade that don’t show up well from this angle, but which add an extra level of variation on what is really a very efficient block floorplate.

The Urban Design panel are due to see it in April 2014, and given a positive response it’s scheduled for the Development Permit Board in June.

 …read more

Source: Changing City