Sugar Wharf Condos – Top 5 Reasons to Invest
Sugar Wharf Condos is one of the most anticipated new condo launches of 2018. It is a multi-phased re-development of the LCBO lands located at Yonge & Queens Quay in one of the most prime locations in Toronto.
Sugar Wharf Condos is the first of five residential towers and a brand new commercial tower that is already under construction.
There are so many reasons for investors to get excited for this condominium and we break down each one in the video below:
- The prime AAA location with direct PATH connection
- Get in early on a multi-phased development
- Similarities to Harbour Plaza Residences, one of the best condo investments of the last few years (if you missed out there, don’t miss out here!)
- One of the largest re-developments of prime Downtown lands
- Developed be Menkes, one of GTA’s leading developer
Sugar Wharf Condos will be launching in June. Now is the ideal time to register and get prepared to be among the first to invest in this exciting new condominium.
Click to Register & Get First Access to Sugar Wharf Condos
Sugar Wharf Condos – Top 5 Reasons to Invest: Watch the Video
Listen & Subscribe to the Podcast
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts・Subscribe on Google Play Music・Subscribe any where you get Podcasts by searching “TalkCondo Release Radar”
Sugar Wharf Condos – Top 5 Reasons to Invest: Transcript
Roy Bhandari: Welcome to the TalkCondo Release Radar. I am Roy Bhandari and I’m joined today by Mike Santos and Amit Bhandari. We’re gonna talk about a very, very special condominium called Sugar Wharf Condominiums and, more specifically, we’re gonna talk about the five reasons that we’re excited about this condominium. We get excited about a lot of condominiums. We like to talk about condos. The reason we get excited is because we work with a lot of investors and we get excited because we get to bring condos that we believe our investors are gonna do very well with.
Roy Bhandari: This one checks so many boxes. There’s a lot of savvy condominium investors out there. They already know that when they see a Menkes condo Downtown Core master planned community, they automatically check all those boxes. But for those that are not as tuned in as we maybe … We really want to go through each one of these and there’s already had intense amount of demand around this project.
Roy Bhandari: We want to dive right in it and talk about what makes this one so special. We’re gonna start with the location. The first reason that we’re excited about Sugar Wharf is the location. It’s a waterfront condominium at Yonge, Queens Quay. Give us a big rundown, Amit, on what’s so special about this location.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. Well, the exact, I guess, specific area that we’re talking about is actually now being called the Lower Yonge Precinct. What that means is it’s Yonge Street and Lower Jarvis, that area between there, that’s called the Lower Yonge Precinct. This development is actually right dead in the center of it. Now historically, this was where the LCBO land, so it’s where LCBO was located for their main headquarters in Downtown Toronto. That is the exact side of this development.
Amit Bhandari: Why is this so incredibly amazing? It’s because of how close it is to, not just for the financial district, but now the expansion of the financial district now called the South financial core. The reason being is because, as any city grows, the financial district is the first part that starts to expand. This is a very, very key part of it because it’s going to be, literally, next door to it and pretty much soon it’s going to be a larger extension of the South financial core.
Roy Bhandari: South financial core is important here because, and again you mentioned the financial district, which is traditionally at Bay and Adelaide.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: As office space there got fully occupied, businesses moving to Toronto needed office space still and there was still this huge demand for prime office spaces. Where the South financial core came from is that the city decided that [crosstalk 00:03:03] municipal is gonna stretch South and that’s where it start from. The benefits of the South financial core, for the commercial companies is that you’re in brand-new spaces, often fitted with advanced technologies, high-speed Internet. They’re built with the modern-
Amit Bhandari: LEED certified.
Roy Bhandari: LEED certified. We are seeing a lot of companies now move their headquarters into the South.
Amit Bhandari: This whole bucket, yeah.
Roy Bhandari: A couple of my favorite examples are, number one, Tellus.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: Tellus is important because they previously had the headquarters in Scarborough. Tellus was one of the first companies, first major companies that decided to shift from the suburb headquarters to downtown. Since then there’s been a lot more, but they were sort of the catalyst. More recently, we had Sun Life Financial moving to the Menkes building and we’re going to talk about that a little bit later. But we’ve seen an expansion of the South financial core.
Amit Bhandari: PricewaterhouseCoopers building.
Roy Bhandari: PricewaterhouseCoopers, RBC Water Place.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: There’s been a huge growth.
Mike Santos: There’s more and more coming as we see with, I mean, not in that area, but obviously the big thing in the news now is Tim Hortons going from their Oakville [crosstalk 00:04:18] for 50 years into the Downtown core and more and more companies are coming in, they need places to go.
Roy Bhandari: The occupancy rate Downtown for office spaces is tiny. As it grows, and we’re gonna get more of these …
Amit Bhandari: This pocket, this stretch, the central waterfront stretch is becoming such a major economic hub for the city.
Roy Bhandari: Just to cut you off, Amit. Sorry.
Amit Bhandari: Sure.
Roy Bhandari: Because we are going to talk about sure this in the next piece. But I do want to get back to the location portion because what’s important to understand here is, it’s important to understand what it’s nearby. You’re downtown and you’re close to so many of the major downtown amenities.
Amit Bhandari: Union Station, GO Bus terminal, GO Train.
Roy Bhandari: ACC.
Amit Bhandari: ACC, yeah.
Roy Bhandari: It’s close to Bank Center, right?
Mike Santos: Yeah, they’re in Nova Scotia, good call. It makes sense.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. The highway.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, the highway.
Mike Santos: The transportation in and out of the city, obviously, of course, and then waterfronts.
Roy Bhandari: Waterfront.
Amit Bhandari: Of course, yeah.
Mike Santos: Because we kind of take that for granted in Toronto. We don’t talk about waterfront, but we’re right on the waterfront.
Roy Bhandari: Well, it’s interesting you say the waterfront because it’s another piece that’s going through so much revitalization. Waterfront Toronto coming to recognize that our waterfront needs a lot of work and there’s been a lot of work put into that. You talked about the Yonge Precinct.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. Lower Yonge Precinct.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, the Lower Yonge Precinct, sorry. Give us a little bit of an overview of what to expect there.
Amit Bhandari: Well, like I said, it’s the stretch between Yonge Street and Lower Jarvis. Before there was basically three pockets that the city recognized needed development. We talked about the first one, which was One Yonge by Pinnacle, which was that the first one, which in case anybody wants to check, is where the Toronto Star Building is located. There was a middle portion which is Sugar Wharf, which historically was the LCBO headquarters. Then the final piece is, right now, it’s the Loblaws. So these are the three major pockets, but the one that we’re focused on today is obviously LCBO lines.
Roy Bhandari: Yes, and that transitions really, really nicely into the number two reason that we’re really excited about this particular building, the Sugar Wharf, is that it’s a multi-phased masterplan.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: We’re not just building one tower at this location.
Mike Santos: This is a big one.
Roy Bhandari: It’s huge. Before we talk about specifically what they’re doing here, I think it’s always important to go back and just sort of emphasize why buying early in a masterplan is tried, trusted, it’s one of the best investment strategies that we do over and over again. Every time we get a masterplan, we reemphasize this because it’s so important. We can rattle off so many examples over the years where you buy the first, second, or third tower in a multiple phase building. So give us a quick rundown on that strategy and the idea behind getting in on the first building.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah, sure. I mean, what a master planned community generally means is that there’s multiple residential towers coming. What we always say is that each successive tower launch the prices are obviously going to go up. So it’s always better from an ROI standpoint, from an investment standpoint to get in at the very beginning stages, first tower, second tower type deal.
Roy Bhandari: When you’ve got these towers you know were coming you’ve got that developer built-in appreciation that you’re able to take advantage of.
Amit Bhandari: Exactly, yeah.
Roy Bhandari: That’s in a nutshell why we love masterplans and that work across the city. We talked about this over and over again. But specifically this one, talk to us about what’s planned on this parcel of land.
Amit Bhandari: This parcel? Yeah, absolutely. This development is well and truly, and we spoke about these a lot in the past, multi-faceted, multi-phased developments. What Menkes is developing here is really a city within a city. There’s gonna be a total of five towers – Actually, sorry, six towers. The initial tower is actually 25 storey office building, which is going to be the new headquarters of LCBO.
Amit Bhandari: Amazing news is that they actually started shoring I think a month ago and excavations have begun, so that’s fantastic news. It’s awesome to see, really, really exciting, and they did a whole thing around that. So, that’s begun. That’s the first tower.
Amit Bhandari: The best way to describe this development is in quadrant. Imagine a rectangle, the bottom right part is going to be the 25 storey office building and the top right corner is phase one. Phase one will be two towers, 64 storeys and 70 storeys.
Roy Bhandari: They’re the short ones.
Amit Bhandari: They’re the short ones. Phase two is going to be three towers, 77, 87, 90.
Roy Bhandari: Amazing.
Amit Bhandari: I know at the very beginning of this episode we talked about, when we made recommendations to invest, it’s about multi-phased, multi-faceted developments and whatnot, this development, alongside the other developments in this area beside it, they’re not just gonna change the neighborhood, they’re gonna change the skyline landscape of Toronto.
Mike Santos: Landscape-changing, yeah.
Amit Bhandari: They’re iconic.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah. Going back, just to tie this a little bit, you mentioned the Toronto skyline.
Amit Bhandari: Yes.
Roy Bhandari: They’re also gonna be very tall towers. These are gonna be very tall, like we’re changing the postcard of Toronto.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: These are gonna have a huge impact on what the city looks, you mentioned the Skyline, obviously, this is going to have a huge impact, these are the gateways into Toronto. It’s very deliberate on where they put the tall towers.
Amit Bhandari: Yup.
Roy Bhandari: Obviously, Toronto recognizes the important parcels and you can see it throughout the city where they put the big density.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. On top of that, so it’s not just a residential piece-
Mike Santos: Yeah, that’s an important part.
Amit Bhandari: The next part, so if you imagine a rectangle again, phase one was the top right corner, top left will be three towers, which are going to be, like I said, 77, 87 and 90. The other amazing piece of this development is the two acre park. Now we have not finalized on the designs yet, they’re still running various competitions with some of the top landscape architectures in Toronto. But two acres park, you don’t see a developer giving back to the city.
Roy Bhandari: I think it’s important to emphasize this. Two acres of land in Downtown Toronto.
Amit Bhandari: It’s huge.
Roy Bhandari: Are you attached to that two acres?
Amit Bhandari: You could easily build four towers on that land.
Mike Santos: It’s hard to picture how much two acres is. It’s hard to picture six towers. It’s hard to understand the scope of the size of this project.
Amit Bhandari: I know.
Mike Santos: But two acres is significant.
Amit Bhandari: In Downtown Toronto it’s significant, given how we’re seeing towers being built on such small parcels of land.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, narrow.
Amit Bhandari: A couple of other key things about this development that have me really, really excited, so it’s not just the public element-
Roy Bhandari: Well, before you jump in that.
Amit Bhandari: Okay.
Roy Bhandari: We talked in previous episodes about the pillars of what makes a great multi-phased community. It’s not just about residential, but it’s a mix of residential, commercial, which you mentioned they’ve already got with LCBO. These other elements in public space, you mentioned they’re doing a two acre park, jobs, so it’s a combination of all of these things, retail, it’s a combination of all of these things that make a great community. it’s not just condo, condo, condo, condo.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. The other, probably really key parts of this is, this is one of those pieces that a lot of people tend to miss, one, it’s not very accessible, the grocery store.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah.
Amit Bhandari: There is plans for a grocery store within this community. Not only that, there’s actually plans for a new elementary school. So you have to understand, so we talked about the towers but we haven’t touched on exactly how many residential units are gonna be there. There’s gonna be 4,369 units. This is like a village in England. With a grocery store. With an elementary school.
Amit Bhandari: The other key thing here, with this element, it’s gonna have path connection, which is a killer piece. This is gonna, we talked about where this is located, we talked about the South financial core, we talked about Union Station, we talked about the north financial district-
Mike Santos: We talked about the gateway to the city, path or the gateway.
Amit Bhandari: The gateway. Now, look at this, you can walk there on the ground with this horrible weather.
Mike Santos: Six months [inaudible 00:13:16].
Amit Bhandari: Exactly. You’re right, we spoke about this with another development about the, five pillars is what we’ve termed, and this checks all those boxes, and even beyond. Even beyond.
Roy Bhandari: Awesome. I want to transition into the third reason we’re excited about this project. It’s a tough one to sort of put on a splash screen. But the reason we’re excited is that there’s so many parallels to a project called Harbour Plaza condos. Just a little bit of background, Harbour Plaza is a condominium project that Menkes, we have a lot of our investors in there, they sold it in 2013. The reason we’re drawing these parallels is because Harbour Plaza has turned out to be one of the best condominiums, condominium full-stop, and condominium investments.
Roy Bhandari: The reason I bring this up is because it’s the same developer, it’s Menkes Development. Both of them are mostly multi-phased. Harbour Plaza was two towers and a commercial building, so again very similar to what we’re talking about, Sugar Wharf. Sugar Wharf is, obviously, this-
Amit Bhandari: Much grander scale.
Roy Bhandari: -at a much grander scale. But you’ve got that shared element of the commercial and the multi-phased.
Amit Bhandari: As well as the expertise of building within the same pocket.
Roy Bhandari: They are both connected by path network. There’s so many elements here that do cross over. I think it’s important to make this parallel. One of the reasons I want to bring up this parallel is because the people who bought … And I want to share some numbers and we’re gonna have this up on the screen as well so you can follow along. In 2013, and remember, we’ve got countless emails of people telling us back then that this is too expensive. The price per square foot was about $576.
Amit Bhandari: Can you get that and don’t tell anyone?
Roy Bhandari: I don’t think you can get it anywhere right now. But stick with me for a minute, I pulled a unit that we sold to a client, it’s on the 39th floor. It’s a high floor, so the price is already elevated. So 39th floor, facing the financial district, it’s 565 square feet, and they paid $361,900. Okay?
Mike Santos: Wow.
Roy Bhandari: As an investment vehicle, and we talked about this a lot, pre-construction as an investment vehicle. Their down payment, this is not what happened but just assume, just to make this easier, that they put down 20% on day one. They’re 20% investment in 2013 would have been $72,000. Today, if they wanted to flip this unit were commanding around $1,100 per square foot, so almost double the price that he paid. To break this down, so if you were to sell that unit today at that approximate $1,100 a foot, the new price from 361,900 price today would be $621,500.
Roy Bhandari: Now to show that as an ROI, you’ve turned $72,000, which was your initial deposit, that property has grown $260,000, not including your initial investment. When you add your initial investment back that return on investment over five years, we’re talking …
Mike Santos: 450%
Roy Bhandari: 400%. I don’t know anywhere that you could have put this $72,000 …
Amit Bhandari: If you do, please let me know.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah. I wish I had a time-travel machine so I could go back and buy more.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: The investment vehicle here is so powerful because it’s all leverage money.
Mike Santos: That’s the key though, right? That 20%, that 72, we often get caught up looking at the overall [crosstalk 00:17:13] purchase price.
Roy Bhandari: Correct.
Mike Santos: But the amount builds up appreciation up until that time.
Roy Bhandari: Menkes are covering the bill for five years. They’re paying 80% for five years.
Mike Santos: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: Right? That’s what you got to remember. That’s where you see there’s such powerful, the equity growth that our clients enjoy here is just incredible. For the people who don’t want to sell, a lot of our clients don’t want to sell now because they recognize that Toronto is in-
Amit Bhandari: We’re always telling the clients that and we have been saying that for a number of years now, price appreciation. If you’re buying in certain neighborhoods where we recognize that there’s a lot more to come, when I say more to come it means not just residential, a lot of office, which means more jobs, more people want to be there, in droves, when you have direct path connections and things like that, hold.
Roy Bhandari: Hold it.
Amit Bhandari: Hold, hold, hold for as long as you can.
Roy Bhandari: For those guys, the person who bought this unit for 360,000, I’m rounding down now just to keep it straightforward.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah, of course.
Mike Santos: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: Carrying costs, just doing math in my head very quickly, 360,000, that includes your mortgage payments at 20% down, your maintenance fees, and your real estate taxes. You’re doing that sort of $1,600 to $1,700 a month, give or take. Rent for this guy today is, conservatively, $2,100 to $2,200 a month. So you’re cash flowing positive after paying down your mortgage. You’re cash flowing $500, $600 a month every single month. Right?
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: When you start to break all this down and you look at the investment, and that’s why I think it’s so important to draw these parallels to Harbour Plaza, it’s becoming one of the best condominiums where demand to get into this building is extremely high, and we’re seeing that because rents are getting picked up very fast, assignments are getting picked up very fast. It’s also important to note that this, the number I mentioned, $2,100 to $2,200 a month on rent is during the occupancy phase where we do tend to see a little bit less.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. It’s not true markup reflection.
Roy Bhandari: By the time this closes, you’ll see-
Amit Bhandari: It’s very different.
Roy Bhandari: I do think it’s important to make these parallels. Obviously, this project is not Harbour Plaza, but they share so many similarities that you can see where we’re drawing these.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. You can see eventually where it’s gonna be.
Roy Bhandari: Correct. If you want to see, if you want to get a sense of build quality and sense of how much emphasis they put on the lobby, they’ve got the Banksy painting in there, which probably means not much to many people but it’s a big deal, the amount of quality of design that they put through the path connection where the public enters in, and all these places and you really get a sense of what they’re doing here. The commercial space, LEED certified, anchor tenant by Sun Life Financial. This is such a stunning building with the curtain wall windows.
Mike Santos: We’re always trying to get people to think beyond just day one of the building. For Harbour, just to bring it back and we talked about it a lot, but again, same parallels, 2013, we’re looking at 2018, we’re still not even at that day one aspect yet.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, correct.
Mike Santos: We have to look beyond day one, today to year five, year 10. Older investors go, “Whoa, I’m gonna be dead in 20 years.” Okay, well, you have family, you have children. This is something that stays in the family for a long time. It’s hard to have that really long-term vision when you’re crunching the numbers, but this is just a potential something on your day one, year one.
Roy Bhandari: If you have more questions about Harbour Plaza, I do encourage the listeners to reach out to us, because I think there’s a lot of shared elements there that I think it borrows from. Just in terms of location as well, it’s basically a block away. This is York and Lake Shore versus Yonge and Lake Shore, so very, very good point.
Roy Bhandari: The next reason that we’re really excited for Sugar Wharf is, and we’ve touched on some of this already, but the scope of the redevelopment. Right? We’ve seen master-planned communities where you’ve got a 20 storey building and a 30 storey building and a grocery store. But I think I really want to reemphasize, we mentioned it already, but the scope, rattle off the heights again, I mean, it’s just starting from there-
Amit Bhandari: Yeah, 64 and 70 are gonna be phase one. Bring back that rectangle again, it’s the top right quadrant, 64, 70; and then the top left part will be three towers, 77, 87 and 90. For a grand total of, and this may change, but for now I’ve been told it’s 4,369 residential units.
Roy Bhandari: Which is huge and again I think it’s … So we’ve been selling condos for a long time now and we’ve seen a lot of master-planned communities, and in terms of the size of this redevelopment, it’s one of the biggest, not necessarily by acreage, but definitely by suite count and storey. I mean, if you add the storeys up, it’s 400 storey building. I just did the math, but I just …
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. It’s not just that, it’s the elements that are involved with this master planned communities. It is that in a nutshell. I’ve mentioned it’s basically a village. They’re building a village within a city.
Mike Santos: How often do you get that opportunity in this kind of location for this scope of project? I think that’s the big thing to look at.
Amit Bhandari: That’s really important because this location, I encourage people to look, just look on Google Maps where the site is.
Roy Bhandari: It really is a once in a lifetime kind of location. It really, really is.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. Just to the base of Yonge, you’re walking distance to all … You’re walking distance to the financial district, even have path connection. The development itself is gonna have grocery stores. I’m gonna touch on this again, but grocery store, retail pavilion, there’s a big emphasis on retail here, and something that we didn’t mentioned before, but Menkes, huge history, amazing developer, but they have a lot of pull when it comes to commercial tenants. Next point-
Roy Bhandari: Let’s get right into that.
Amit Bhandari: Sure.
Roy Bhandari: Let’s jump into that. Number five reason that we’re so excited about Sugar Wharf condos is the developer, Menkes Development. Now we talked about developers a lot. Again, to sort of take it back to something I said at the beginning of this video, the reason we get excited about certain developers is because: a, they make our clients money; b, they make our lives easy; c, see they make our clients life easy.
Roy Bhandari: I always love to share a couple of my favorite Menkes anecdotes. I have one of my clients, one of our very good clients has bought multiple units with us. The first building that closed was with another developer and he had not such a great experience. In fact, we knew about all the bumps along the way. By contrast, he did his PDI from Menkes, and I know he was nervous going up to it. He said, “I don’t go through this again.” I said, “You’re in good hands.” He went to the PDI and he made the point to call me afterwards and say, “Roy, I had such an amazing experience at this PDI. Everything was top-notch. Everything was handled.” To get that phone call was a great feeling for me and I immediately shared it with the team.
Roy Bhandari: Another anecdote I have is, one of our clients had a PDI, I don’t remember the exact day, but, say, it was a Wednesday. I got a call a couple of days before from one of the managers there and they say, “Roy, do you mind if we move the appointment by one day?” and I say, “Why? Is everything okay?”
Amit Bhandari: They have to.
Roy Bhandari: “Can we move it one day, on Thursday instead of Wednesday?” I said, “Is everything okay? He says, “Everything’s fine. But Menkes went through the suite and it didn’t meet their standards.”
Amit Bhandari: It wasn’t clean enough.
Roy Bhandari: It wasn’t clean enough. He said, “We need to get another cleaner through and make sure it’s spotless for the investors.” Because they recognize when, they spent this much money, they’re walking into the suite for the first time, the initial-
Mike Santos: The white glove treatment.
Roy Bhandari: The white glove treatment, right. We say this all the time, we deal with so many developers and that kind of treatment and that kind of attention, the minuscule details, it doesn’t happen very often.
Mike Santos: It reflects within the rest of the building and the community. If they’re that …
Amit Bhandari: Not just that, it reflects a lot on the developer as well. They genuinely care.
Roy Bhandari: I mentioned at the top of the episode that there’s a lot of savvy investors out there and when they see Menkes it immediately checks a big box and these are the reasons why. People know that. These kinds of stories get shared. Another reason we always like to talk about the development, especially in today’s pre-construction climate where knowing who you’re buying from is more important than ever before.
Amit Bhandari: Absolutely.
Roy Bhandari: They’ve been in business for 60 years. They’re a third generation company. One of the big things about Menkes is that it doesn’t necessarily look great on a glossy brochure, but being in the industry we know how important it is, is that Menkes are vertically integrated and they have their own construction company.
Mike Santos: Yeah, in-house.
Roy Bhandari: The importance of that is that instead of hiring …
Amit Bhandari: Joe’s Quality.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, another another company to build your tower, you’re in control of every aspect of that. Timelines are important. You’re not waiting for another company to finish the previous tower before they move onto yours. I mean, we were looking at the Harbour Plaza closing dates, occupancy was scheduled on day one of signing as May 2018 and they’re actually early. They were there. So, all of these things point to why we get excited.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah, a lot of experience.
Roy Bhandari: Another area of experience is that it’s not just a residential building. We’re going to see why that’s so important. Talk to me about that element of it.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah. Well, Sugar Wharf itself, we mentioned that there’s so many, it’s not just residential. There’s a lot of elements. We talked about the office component, which like I said, I mentioned before, amazing thing that they’ve started excavating already. That’s amazing. They’ve got experience in office. They’ve got experience in retail, retail pavilion at this development. Obviously, residential. So, those are the three key areas that they’re probably the leading developers in retail, and then there’s other areas that they’re not gonna part of this development, but they help-
Roy Bhandari: Show the scope of the development.
Amit Bhandari: Obviously. They have a lot of experience in industrial side of it as well. Then on top of that, they’ve got a lot of experience on low-rise, so detached houses, semi-detached house, right across the GTA, and then obviously, high-rise developments.
Roy Bhandari: You mentioned that they’re very experienced in commercial retail. I want to emphasize why that’s so important. Again, I’m gonna draw a parallel with other developers that may not have the same reach or pull.
Mike Santos: [Crosstalk 00:28:19]
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, very importantly. We’ve seen other retail pavilions from other builders that you don’t end up with the best companies because you don’t have that relationship. Menkes do have that relationship with these builders from years, many, many years. When it comes to commercial space, you want to be working with … Menkes have those relationships and the pull to be working with the best companies to bring in the best.
Amit Bhandari: They also have the name, the recognition as well.
Mike Santos: Yeah.
Amit Bhandari: For those individuals who have never perhaps worked with Menkes to know that, yes, this is the developer to work with when it comes to perhaps leasing a space within one of their existing towers.
Roy Bhandari: I think it’s important to name a few projects that people may be familiar with. We’ve obviously named Harbour Plaza, 365 Church was another one launched a few years ago, incredibly successful for our investors, 770 Bay in College, which is one of the most competitive neighborhoods in Downtown Toronto. But 770 Bay, which was a building that they built a number of years ago, but still remains one of the most sought-after in terms of price per square foot and rental demand. They’ve got the Four Seasons, they were arguably the best building in Downtown Toronto. The most luxurious building in Downtown Toronto, the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences.
Roy Bhandari: When you start to look at this scope of projects you quickly realize why we get excited.
Mike Santos: Portfolio is very impressive.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, for sure. I think we got across how-
Amit Bhandari: Yeah, how much we love Menkes here.
Roy Bhandari: Yeah, Menkes and the development.
Amit Bhandari: Development, everything.
Roy Bhandari: There’s so many checked boxes here, right? Like I said at the top of the episode, there’s already an intense amount of demand in this condominium and when you break down the reasons why it’s very easy to see and understand why that is.
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Mike Santos: We’ve been very excited about this area and when you meet us in person you will share that exact same excitement. It’s true.
Amit Bhandari: Our voice volume goes up when we talk about this.
Mike Santos: Yeah. We kind of geek out on it a bit, but it’s definitely important. It’s one of those ones where …
Amit Bhandari: The once in a lifetime opportunities.
Mike Santos: Yeah.
Amit Bhandari: The thing is, we always miss this, but it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on these. It’s not very often you get to work on these kinds of developments.
Roy Bhandari: We talked about scope as a point, right?
Amit Bhandari: Yeah.
Roy Bhandari: We got enough of the path a little bit, but it is important. These big towers that have come into Toronto that are elevating the city as a whole, 80, 90 storey towers, and they’re gonna change the way we think about the city moving forward.
Roy Bhandari: I think that’s everything we got for now. We’re obviously very, very excited for Sugar Wharf and, for investors who are looking for this, something great to put you put your money into. We highly recommend this project and we can’t wait to work with on Sugar Wharf.
