Morguard Investments Limited is a full-services, real estate investment management and development company which offers value added financial products to institutions wishing to invest profitably in Canadian property. The company purchases, develops, manages and sells assets on behalf of its clients, endeavouring to provide each of them with a well-diversified, expanding, investment portfolio.

Morguard also serves the accommodation needs of Canadian business, by providing well-located, superior managed office, industrial and retail space in target markets. While pursuing its business goals, Morguard stresses innovation and intelligent risk-sharing in all of its endeavours, bound by the balanced interests of tenants, investor clients, employees and shareholders. Morgard is owned 80 percent by The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and 20 percent by management.

Morguard established itself as a major force in the Canadian real estate industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the placement of mortgage investments on behalf of Canadian pension funds and other institutions. In 1975, Morguard pioneered the concept of tax-exempt real estate equity investment for Canadian pension funds and created Pensionfund Realty Limited, a company it has managed since inception. Currently Morguard manages $1.8 billion of real estate on behalf of the company’s institutional clients. The leasable area of the client portfolio is some 21 million square feet, housing over 2,500 tenants, making Morguard the largest manager of tax-exempt real estate in Canada.

Morguard operates nine regional offices across Canada where property management, appraisal, leasing and accounting functions are performed, and complements its internal real estate expertise through the use of external consultants, including architects, engineers, lawyers, brokers, appraisers, and general contractors. When called upon, these professionals provide the highest level of expertise available in each of the markets that Morguard operates.
 

1. This 71,000 square foot high-tech property located in Vancouver is indicative of the ten million square feet of industrial properties in the portfolio. 2. Scotia Place is a 550,000 square foot office building located on the main downtown intersection in edmonton.

Morguard’s Office, Industrial and Shopping Centre operations departments are responsible for day-to-day management of the properties which comprise the investment portfolio. The economy of scale associated with the operation of a 21 million square foot portfolio allows Morguard to provide a level of service which is unavailable elsewhere in the industry. The growth in the size of the managed portfolio during the past 17 years serves as testimony to the successful relationship that Morguard continues to enjoy with its clients and tenants.

The Morguard managed investment portfolio has approximately 30 percent of its assets in office properties, 34 percent in retail, 24 percent in industrial, 11 percent in mixed use, and 1 percent in development sites. This balance has allowed investors to participate in the service, consumer product, and industrial sectors of the economy and has been proven to be risk adverse and profitable. Portfolio diversification by geographic location, reflecting population base and strength of the local economy, is as important as diversification by property type.

Current strategy has resulted in 30 percent of the portfolio in Victoria and Vancouver, 11 percent in Edmonton and Calgary, 6 percent in Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, 36 percent in Toronto, 7 percent in Ottawa and 10 percent in Montreal.