Montreal developer YULiv has made its highest profile purchase yet. It bought the historic Balfour Building, an office landmark at 3575 Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
YULiv and Nexarm, its partner on the deal, recently closed on the 10-storey, 96-year-old property from Toronto-based Allied for $30 million, or $162.76 per square foot, according to CoStar data. The building is one of the most recognizable structures on The Main, the bustling strip popular with artists, students and immigrants.
YULiv said its purchase of the roughly 184,000-square-foot property was made possible through a 50-50 partnership with Nexarm, part of George Armoyan’s group of companies.
“To be completely transparent, the deal wouldn’t have happened without the Armoyan group,” YULiv president Ali Farasat said in an interview. “They are much wealthier, they were able to push it, and we’re half owners.
Farasat said YULiv plans to keep the building primarily as office space, but it will remain flexible.
“We’re going to try to rent it as office,” he said. “We definitely will be keeping the first four, five floors office but if we can’t rent other floors, then we’ll see. We’re keeping options. We understand the need for commercial on the Plateau, and we would like to keep it as much commercial as possible.”
The Balfour Building is on the downtown side of the urban area that CoStar classifies as Montreal’s Centre-de-l’Ile Nord office market. The market has a vacancy rate of 16%, or 2.6% higher than a year ago, according to a CoStar Market Analytics report. Asking rents in the Centre-de-l’Ile Nord area have risen by 4.6% over the past 12 months and now average about $32.56 per square foot.
Appealing to tech firms
Farasat said he believes the building’s location offers strong potential.
“There’s only three or four large office buildings on Saint Laurent,” Farasat said. “I think Balfour is the second largest, and I think there’s a lot of tech companies who maybe don’t want to be downtown or Old Port, maybe want to be somewhere a bit more funky with a bit lower rent.”
The building was about 50% vacant at the time of sale, but Farasat said that wasn’t due to lack of interest. “It wasn’t for lack of demand,” he said. “When I spoke to the [leasing] broker, with Colliers, they said they had demand, but word had come out that Allied was selling and they weren’t entertaining.”
Allied has long been a major player in Montreal’s office market, having owned dozens of properties along Saint Laurent Boulevard and downtown. In 2024, Allied sold its 10-storey, 80,000-square-foot office building at 4446 Saint Laurent in Montreal’s Plateau, for $18.75 million, near its assessed value, according to CoStar.
The company has also invested heavily in Montreal landmark projects such as the Gare Viger redevelopment, where Allied partnered on a $500 million mixed-use transformation that brought new office space, apartments and a hotel to a historic site.
Before selling the Balfour Building, Allied spent about $24 million on a refurbishment of the property that included upgrading its heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. “They redid the HVAC system, did facade, bricks, and they redid elevators and brought the building to code,” Farasat said. “So it’s an older building in some ways, but if you walk in it, you see the improvements.”
Farasat said his firm has zeroed in on Saint Laurent for its acquisitions and that over one-quarter of its properties are on the strip. “We have about 16 buildings on Saint Laurent, own about 60 in total,” he said. “We own a lot on Saint Laurent, and we believe in the street.”