Expediting Development: A Case Study
Edward Cattana
The Sorbara Group
The Sorbara Group is a mid-size integrated real estate development company. The group develops industrial and residential land, builds industrial buildings for lease, builds houses for sale, conducts third-party commercial and industrial construction and manages its own industrial and office portfolio of several million square feet. Its website is www.sorbaragroup.com.
The Sorbara Group has built buildings in virtually every municipality across the southern portions of the GTA, from Oakville through to Whitby. It maintains most of these buildings in its management portfolio. In addition, its general contractor, Hady Construction Associates, has built all over southern Ontario for others in addition to The Sorbara Group and counts among its key clients The Home Depot (9 stores)and Canadian Tire (10 stores) as well as commercial and industrial buildings for owner-users and for third-party investors. We have been building in Vaughan for over twenty years; our name has in fact become synonymous with the City of Vaughan. We believe that each prospect who decides to come to Vaughan will eventually pass through our doors.
The Sorbara Group is currently building on a parcel of land that originally measured 70 acres on the north side of Highway #7, just west of Highway #27. As development The Sorbara Group was required to set aside about 15 acres for future acquisition by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) as the ramp entrance to northbound Highway #427 extension and was required to accept a holding-zone freeze on another 15 acres in order to allow MTO in its own time to finalize the alignment of Highway #427 as it goes north from Highway #7. The remainder of the property is now under construction and will be fully built out by the end of 2005 (see site plan). The build-out includes a 325,000 sq. ft. building for Totalline Transportation (100 Vaughan Valley Blvd.), a 185,000 sq. ft. building for Jeld-Wen Windows (90 Stoneridge Rd.), a 117,000 sq. ft. building for Owen & Company Ltd., o/a Kingsdown Mattress and a further 120,000 sq. ft. for which marketing is about to commence as of April 1st 2005. A Shell service centre site has been located at the corner and a commercial pad is awaiting the appropriate user.
The City of Vaughan is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Canada, if not in North America. This growth is in all areas of real estate development, including residential housing, commercial retail construction and explosive industrial construction. The resources of the City in any given week are severely taxed, notwithstanding the efforts the City makes to keep up with the pace of development. If you are familiar with the geography of the Greater Toronto Area and the City of Vaughan’s position with respect to the various forces in the GTA, you understand quickly why the City of Vaughan attracts the growth that it does. It is at the centre of the population of the GTA and contains at its heart Highway #400, the transportation spine of Ontario and the newly-opened Highway #407, which takes traffic east and west through the city and passes just to the south of our site. Our site is 10 kilometers from the departure-level ramps of Pearson International Airport and that route is directly up highway #427. Industrial and commercial tax rates are among the lowest in the GTA and I would venture to say that the workforce available to business in Vaughan is second to none in Ontario, and perhaps in Canada.
All of these positives of course make the job of being an industrial developer and builder in the City of Vaughan easier than it may be in other municipalities. However, the growth rate and the historic ability of the development community in the GTA to respond to the needs of industrial users have created unrealistic expectations in the process of design, construction and delivery of major buildings. At the same time, Vaughan has rightfully focused on quality in its developments and this focus has led to the appropriate approval regime that is common in all major cities in Canada. And so we have two opposing forces; a user and his developer-builder seeking to compress timelines, most often because they have left decisions too long in limbo and a municipality that wants to co-operate but also realizes that buildings are here for a long time and the community only has one chance to get it right.
The Sorbara Group has built several million square feet in the City of Vaughan, beginning in the days when Council Meetings were relatively informal, everyone smoked and our representatives could call everyone in the municipal offices by their first name. The explosive growth has changed all that and, like every major city, Vaughan has had to add the appropriate staff to maintain its growth while at the same time maintaining the quality of its development.
In late 2003, The Sorbara Group was presented with an opportunity to make a proposal to Totalline Transportation for a new head office and warehouse facility. By early 2004, we had worked out an agreement with Totalline to locate them as the first user in our Corporate Business Park. The location was on a street that was in the process of being built (Stoneridge Road) where that street met Vaughan Valley Blvd., a new road that had recently been installed adjacent to the east limit of our holdings. One of the critical points in the agreement we made with Totalline was a delivery date of December 1st for the floor of the building and January 1st 2004 for the full completion, including office move-in. In early February we were given the go-ahead for plans but timelines would indicate 5 weeks for plans, 12 weeks for site plan approval, 6 weeks for building permit and 24 weeks for construction. Clearly there was no way we could make the December 1st delivery for the floor, unless we had the total co-operation of everyone on the project team. This team was made up of our construction affiliate, Hady Construction Associates, our architect and his team of mechanical, structural and civil consultants, the lawyers who were doing the lease work and, of course, The City of Vaughan as represented by their site plan process and their building permit process.
We contacted Frank Miele, the Commissioner of Economic/Technology Development & Communications, and in a quickly-arranged brief meeting asked him if he would assist us to pull together all the Vaughan teams into one meeting so that we could outline a process to fast-track all the approvals required for the project. Frank arranged a meeting in less than a week and we sat together in one of the City’s boardrooms to outline our objectives and our dilemmas to all the members of the Vaughan staff who would have input into the process. Each group expressed its willingness to pull all the stops to assist us in making sure this project was given every chance of meeting the timelines required.
They promised they would do their utmost to perform and they did. The building permit was issued, the building was started and the floor delivered on December 1st as promised. We are indeed grateful for all the work put in by Frank and all of his colleagues in making this project happen.
We found a special way to show our gratitude to the City. This time we went to our “friends” in the city in early April of 2004 this time with an 185,000 sq. ft. project for Jeld-Wen Windows, with the same December 1st delivery date. With this monumental task at hand we were received warmly. We were kind enough to add an additional complication for this building; the freeze-line mentioned above for Highway #427 needed to be moved slightly to the west to accommodate the building. This was both a City of Vaughan and Provincial issue. As well, our tenant Jeld-Wen changed a couple of key elements in the building design after the plans were submitted and the site plan approval process underway. Even with these two additional critical factors, the City of Vaughan pulled all the stops and provided the required approvals in order to allow us to pull our permit in July thus allowing us to deliver this building on December 1st, 2004. Although it normally takes up to three months to process a building permit, the City’s team expedited it in six weeks. As indicated in Vaughan’s Business Link newsletter “The City of Vaughan treated us in an unbelievably fantastic fashion in a timeframe that worked for us.” “Without their assistance, we would not have been able to start the building for our client”. Lou Valeriati the General Manager of Jeld-Wen choose our site because the wanted to stay in the City of Vaughan, their old location was at 8550 Keele Street under the United Windows banner. Jeld-Wen is a leading manufacturer of fine windows and doors for the residential construction market. Lou indicated the reason why the move was necessary in the Vaughan Business Link article: “This was an opportunity to move new state-of –the-art production equipment into place.”
The Sorbara Group is grateful to the City of Vaughan for the efforts it has put in on its behalf. As this article is being written, we are once again calling on Frank to arrange another meeting. We have recently secured a transaction for an 117,000 sq. ft. building and, once again, the magic date is December 1st. The footprint of the building was finalized on March 31st 2005 and we will be at the City seeking their full co-operation to once again meet a tight deadline.
We look forward to this year and the years ahead working with this city. We are proud to be part of their growth and expect this growth to continue for many years into the future. It is our desire to continue to focus on development in the City of Vaughan; we find that it has become easy to sell our location as well as the city to users. We hope the city finds dealing with us easy as well. It is goal to create landmarks for years to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ed Cattana is Senior Property Manager at The Sorbara Group, Vaughan, Ontario, an integrated real estate, development, investment and management firm with a 50-year history of business growth in Ontario. He can be reached at ecattana@sorbaragroup.com