Article – Westmount Square – October 11, 2014

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SECTION B | THE GAZETTE | MONTREAL | SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2014 | BUSINESS ASSIGNMENT EDITOR: LYNN MOORE | [email protected]
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EVA FRIEDE
THE GAZETTE
An investor has bought 84 rental
units at Westmount Square for $70
million, and says that less than two
months after the sale, he has already resold at least 48 of the apartments.
Olivier Leclerc, 26, acting with
real estate broker and adviser
Albert Sayegh, bought the units
at the iconic Mies van der Rohe
buildings in August from Elad
Canada, a division of the Israeli
real estate multinational Tshuva
Group.
The deal means that Elad has
sold all of the approximately 220
units in the two residential towers
of Westmount Square. Now it is
proposing to convert Tower 1, with
200,000 square feet of office space,
to condos.
But Westmount has slapped a
freeze on all conversions from commercial or institutional buildings
to residential use and is studying
all development in its southeast
Changes could be afoot at the iconic Westmount Square
complex, a legacy of architect Mies van der Rohe. A
multinational has sold the last of its residential units in a
landmark deal and now aims to covert office tower to condos
PRIME
3% Sept. 3
commercial sector, from Atwater
to Greene Avenues. The freeze is
in effect until an interim bylaw is
adopted and an update on the study
is expected in November, said Westmount councillor Theodora Samiotis.
Samiotis, who is the commissioner of urban planning for Westmount, said there are two concerns
about such a conversion. First
is Westmount Square’s heritage
value as a Mies van der Rohe mixed
commercial-residential project,
completed in 1967. “On a heritage
value, obviously we would want to
make sure that any architectural
aspect of the design would respect
that,” she said.
And there are those who would
argue that changing the usage combination would change the architect’s vision, she said. The complex
was conceived with three towers
— two residential and one office —
and an 86,000-square-foot shopping
concourse.
Please see SQUARE, Page B2
JOHN KENNEY/THE GAZETTE
Elad Canada is proposing to convert Tower 1, left, of Westmount Square, with 200,000 square feet of office space, to condos. But Westmount has imposed a freeze on all conversions.
France’s 36-year-old economy minister
is the face of the New Socialism
LIZ ALDERMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ED ALCOCK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
France’s new economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, is bent on modernizing the country’s social model. “France is sick,” he says.
PARIS — Around 9 p.m. on a recent
weeknight, all the lights in Emmanuel Macron’s cavernous offices
at the French Economy Ministry
were blazing. A coterie of energetic 30-something aides scurried
through the hallways, fingers tapping at their iPhones as stacks of
takeout dinners circulated on trays.
If not for his aura of authority,
Macron might easily have been
mistaken for one of his employees.
The 36-year-old former investment
banker, whom President François
VRSP
MADE EASY WITH
RBC
®
TM
Hollande appointed in August to
oversee the economy, had just ended
another marathon day of meetings
that began at 7 a.m.
“We have a very long day here,
but there’s a lot of work to be done,”
Macron said, settling onto a black
couch. “France is sick,” he said,
“and we are facing difficult times.
We have no choice but to reform this
country.”
A decade ago, Macron might have
seemed out of place in these halls of
power, which have tended to be run
by elder statesmen focused on bolstering the vaunted French welfare
state. But as one of the youngest
people ever to hold a Cabinet position, he has quickly become the face
of France’s New Socialism, a probusiness technocrat bent on modernizing the country’s social model.
Despite his youth, Macron has
been a major force behind a recent
shift by the politically struggling
Hollande toward a more centrist
economic policy for France. The
economy is essentially stagnant and
mired in what Macron describes as
“mass unemployment” — around 10
per cent, just shy of the 11.5 per cent
eurozone average.
Please see NEW SOCIALISM, Page B2
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MONSAF85977_1_1
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busi ne s s
the gazette
· montrealgazette.com · S a t u r d ay, October 11, 2014
Square ‘It’s not just the conversion of any building. It’s a landmark’
Continued from B1
Equally important to Samiotis is the commercial vibrancy of the area.
“So when you tell me you
are changing a commercial
tower to a residential tower, I
am concerned about the impact this is going to have on
my commercial district,” she
said.
Residential tax rates are
lower than commercial rates,
so the city also could lose revenue.
“It’s not just the conversion
of any building. It’s a landmark,” she said.
They are very much aware
of the proposal to convert the
office tower, Sayegh said, but
the file is currently closed.
“If Tower 1 does occur, we
will look at it,” he said.
Elad Canada owns, operates or is developing such
properties as New York’s
Plaza Hotel, Emerald City
in Toronto and in Montreal,
the Cité Nature development
near the Olympic Village
and Le Nordelac in Point StCharles.
The 84 Westmount Square
units were the remaining
rental units in two of the towers.
In a meeting at Sayegh’s
real estate office — he is
president of the commercial division of RE/MAX
Du Cartier on Bernard St.
W. — Leclerc said he bought
the apartments in August as
an investment, and resold
them to various groups of investors, two of which bought
about 12 apartments each. Leclerc would not specify how
many of the apartments he
intends to keep.
It is a significant sale,
probably the biggest of the
year, said Patrice Ménard of
Patrice Ménard Multi-Logement, which specializes in
sales of multi-unit residential buildings. But it is not a
record.
By comparison, the La Cité
complex of three buildings
with more than 1,300 units
sold for $172 million two
years ago.
Also in 2012, Elad sold the
Olympic Village to Capreit Real Estate Investment
Trust for about $176 million,
Ménard said. Both La Cité
and the Olympic Village remain rental properties, however.
Both Sayegh and Leclerc
emphasized that confidence
in the economy was a basis
for the Westmount Square
purchase. The reselling was
not a flip, but a long-term
strategy, Sayegh said. “He has
his own chess game,” Sayegh
said.
“The context was favourable to take hold of such a
prestigious building — the
political context,” Leclerc
said.
“The socio-economic climate in Quebec has never
been as conducive to investments as it is today,” Sayegh
added.
Leclerc would not say what
profit he has taken so far, nor
what return he is expecting.
“It’s a nice acquisition to
my portfolio,” Leclerc said.
John Kenney/THE GAZETTE
Westmount Square is considered a landmark of 20th century
design, revolutionary in being set back from the sidewalk
and thereby creating public spaces.
Mies and Montreal
Eva Friede
montreal GAZETTE
John Mahoney/THE GAZETTE
Olivier Leclerc has purchased 84 units in Westmount Square for $70 million. “The context
was favourable to take hold of such a prestigious building — the political context,” he says.
John Kenney/THE GAZETTE
The price of the 84 apartments in Westmount Square bought by Oliver Leclerc in August
ranged from $400,000 to $2 million. “We never throw out the tenants,” he says.
He also owns or has converted buildings in Mont
St-Hilaire and Brossard as
well as Hampstead Court on
Queen Mary, bought in 2011
and now all sold.
Four years ago, Leclerc
joined his father, Ghislain,
in the business of converting
rental buildings to co-operatives.
Over 25 years, he and his
Westmount Square, comprising two residential
towers, one office tower
and a shopping concourse,
is the work of German
born modernist master
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
It was completed in 1967.
In 1990, after much controversy, skylights were
added to the shopping
concourse. Phyllis Lambert, known as Montreal’s
Joan of Architecture and a
champion of Mies van der
Rohe, called the renovation
a desecration.
At age 27, Lambert persuaded her father, Samuel
Bronfman, to commission Mies to design the
Seagram Building in New
father have converted more
than 2,500 apartments, he
said. His father is now semiretired.
With his father, he also
worked on the conversion of
the Gleneagles apartments on
Côte des Neiges Rd., bought
in 2010 and sold by 2013.
“We do major work. We put
the building in top shape,”
Leclerc said.
“Then we make esthetic
improvements. After that, we
sell the apartments.
“We never throw out the
tenants. We profit from the
fact that the tenants are in
place, who pay rent ‘x’ for an
York. Completed with
architect Philip Johnson
in 1958, it is considered a
landmark of 20th century
design, revolutionary in
being set back from the
sidewalk and thereby creating public spaces.
A gas station on Nuns’
Island is often attributed
to Mies van der Rohe. But
Joe Fujikawa, who worked
for Mies, was the project
architect and nothing
was designed without his
input, according Lambert.
Mies van der Rohe
died in 1969, in Chicago,
his adopted hometown.
Among other landmarks
of his legacy: the Barcelona Pavilion, the TorontoDominion Centre in Toronto and Chicago’s Lake
Shore Apartments.
apartment in the state it is in.
“We respect the rental
laws.”
Leclerc said he buys only
good buildings in good locations.
“The area reflects the tenants. Location, location, location.”
At Westmount Square, the
tenants are not affected, Leclerc said, as the same company, Cogir, manages the
building.
The range of price for the
84 apartments was $400,000 to
$2 million.
efriede@evitastyle
New Socialism Minister’s job to sell Hollande’s open-for-business plan
Continued from B1
As part of the Hollande
government’s newly stated
resolve, last week it issued a
“no austerity” declaration
of budgetary independence
from the German-led orthodoxy that has been widely
blamed for making economic
growth hard to achieve in
much of the eurozone. Even
as it announced 50 billion euros ($63 billion US) in spending cuts over the next three
years, the government said
it would not meet the deficit
targets overseen by the European Union until at least
2017.
On Monday, news reports
suggested that the European
Commission might be preparing to censure France when it
reviews its new budget. But
Simon O’Connor, a commission spokesman, said it was
premature to say how Brussels might respond until after
France submits the budget,
which is expected on Oct. 15.
In many ways it is Macron’s job to help sell the Hollande administration’s new
approach — not only to corporate France but to a French
public worried about its future.
“F rance is a strong,
wealthy country,” he said,
citing a strong research and
development base, universal education, large foreign
investment and world-class
companies. “But we are always obsessed by our own
weaknesses,” he continued.
“It’s sort of a French state of
mind.”
Still, even as he means to
help Hollande push an ambitious but politically perilous
drive to brand France as a
country that is open for business and unafraid of globalization, he does not want his
country to lose its innate
egalitarian Frenchness.
“I don’t believe that killing
the French model in order to
become the U.K. or the United
States overnight is the solution,” he said. “You have a big
debate on inequality there,
and for our society, a lot of
inequality would not be bearable.”
That has forced Macron
to walk a fine line ever since
Hollande rang his cellphone
in late August to ask if he
would take the job of economy minister.
French business leaders
cheered the news, seeing in
Macron a new hope for reform.
But there was a wariness
bordering on outrage among
the most left-leaning Socialists and from unions. They
viewed Hollande’s ouster of
Arnaud Montebourg, the former economy minister who
had battled big business, and
replacing him with Macron,
as a betrayal of the welfare
state.
“Installing a banker while
our country is suffering from
the domination of finance is
not a good sign,” said JeanMarc Germain, a Socialist
member of Parliament.
Macron met Hollande in
2007 during a party at the
home of Jacques Attali, an
influential French economist and an adviser to several
presidents, and the two men
hit it off. At the time, Macron
had just done a surprising
about-face from an early career in academic philosophy,
working with the late Paul
Ricoeur, an eminent French
philosopher who focused
on human consciousness.
Macron obtained a master’s
degree after partly focusing
his studies on Machiavelli,
which, he said with a smile,
was good background for
navigating the power politics
of Paris.
He entered the École Nationale d’Administration, the
training ground for France’s
governmental elite, pausing
in 2007 to marry his former
French teacher from first
grade, Brigitte Trogneux,
who is 20 years his senior. In
2008, he was snapped up by
Rothschild, working mainly
in Paris, a job that made him
a millionaire.
When Hollande ran successfully for the presidency
in 2012, he campaigned on a
classic leftist platform that
promised greater security for
the middle class and higher
taxes on the wealthy. But behind the scenes, he called on
Macron as an informal ad-
viser to assure the business
community that he was also
open to reforms that would
help companies create jobs
and lift France from moribund growth.
Macron’s first move was
to urge Hollande to drop
a proposal to tax incomes
above 1 million euros at 75
per cent. Instead, Hollande
forged ahead, spending two
years trying to burnish his
Socialist credentials instead
of tackling the reforms that
both men knew were needed,
Macron said.
As the French economy
continued to flag, Hollande
made Macron his main economic adviser at the Élysée
Palace in 2012. This time, he
pushed the president hard
to break with the “old socialism,” helping to draft a socalled Responsibility Pact
that increased flexibility in
France’s rigid labour market
and promised companies 40
billion euros in tax breaks
in exchange for pledges to do
more hiring.
Now, what is important,
Macron said, is that France
continue to streamline and
modernize the welfare state.
That will be no easy task.
Numerous French presidents
have rolled out reform plans,
only to fold after the French
took to the streets. What if
Hollande, already the most
unpopular president in modern French history, now decides to retreat?
Mulling the question, Macron lifted a glass of Burgundy
wine, a pleasure that he permitted himself given the late
hour, then grew suddenly serious.
“The deal I had with the
president and the prime minister was to deliver. If they
decide not to deliver, I will
move.”
He continued: “But I do
think that there is a strong
conviction that there is no
choice but to reform this
country. It will probably be
painful, and perhaps we will
fail in the end. But France
will succeed.”
Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris, and
James Kanter from Brussels.