This is the second in a series of articles in our Special Report on Real Estate in Canada and around the world.
With its potential for rapid capital appreciation, a hedge against market volatility and financial security for future generations, real estate has historically been a place where wealthy families invested. According to the UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, family offices are heavy real estate investors, with the asset class comprising one-tenth of portfolios.
Of course, investing in real estate is more complex now than it used to be, as changing market conditions and evolving opportunities have created a wide variety of plays, from owning multiple residences and vacation properties to purchasing commercial and industrial buildings. And there’s more to real estate exposure than direct ownership. Families are also looking at less direct options, such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).
“Investors are going both into direct, private real estate and doing more in publicly traded REITs because of the overall enhancement to the real estate portfolio,” says Michael Nairne, president and chief executive officer at Tacita Capital Inc. in Toronto.
In addition to REITs, industrial and food-anchored retail are also high on the list of areas of interest for real estate investors today, says Jonathan Yuan, principal, Capital Markets Group Canada, Avison Young. “And multi-family purpose-built rental is a good match for family office investment criteria.”
Gavin Reiff, vice-president, real estate advisory, at Richter LLP in Toronto, says the focus of many investors is on income generation. “We think the opportunities today are buying high-quality income producing assets that are difficult to replace,” he says.
Reiff adds that income-producing assets exist in many sectors, whether that’s apartment buildings, retail plazas or industrial buildings. And now may be a good time to buy. “The valuations have been marked down over the past couple of years,” he says.
Here are some of the specific real estate opportunities family offices are exploring today, according to the experts:
Purpose-built rentals
“The real estate community knows that our large cities in Canada are still structurally undersupplied, and we continue to have a housing shortage,” says Reiff.
As a result, many families are now exploring purpose-built rental, says Yuan, which are properties intended to be rented for the long term. “The numbers are starting to make sense with government lending programs like the Apartment Construction Loan Program and breaks on development charges and taxes,” he says. “It is not across the board, but it is happening.”
Condos
Condos are also seeing a lot of pickup, says Yuan. In Toronto and Vancouver, which have “stressed” condo markets, “some family offices are buying bulk condos—30 to 50 units—from distressed developers where units do not close, hiring a property manager with experience in this sector, then leasing out as a rental,” says Yuan. “The attractiveness is in the bulk discount of the units that allows adequate returns with upside on the capital value.” He adds that he has heard of discounts of 25 per cent or higher.
Office space
Contrarians are looking at office space, says Nairne, a sector of the market that took a big hit during the pandemic and the work-from-home trend that followed. He says that as workforces mandate in-person work and the demand for amenity-rich buildings increases, there will be a shortage of quality office space in many urban markets in the next few years. “I think that’s where you can see the contrarian multi-family office putting some dollars there,” he says.
Retirement properties
Retirement homes, wellness and old-age retirement communities are also going to see a lot of interest from real estate investors, predicts Nairne. “Those are going to continue to explode” due to demographic shifts, he says. “You’ve got a wave of people in their 70s and 80s who have yet to make any kind of [housing] transition.”
Prefab homes
Manufactured homes are another attractive area, says Nairne, as the housing affordability crisis in Canada will drive many people to consider them. With their lower maintenance costs and low tenant turnover, “they can be very attractive, affordable and mobile,” he says.
Food-anchored retail
This asset class, which includes shopping centres where a grocery store is the anchor tenant, is attractive to family offices because it is resilient—people need to buy groceries in good times and bad. “The ability to generate long term income while preserving capital value allows family offices to meet their key investment goal: to distribute cash to the family plan,” Yuan says.
Self-storage
Although it has cooled off in recent years, Nairne says that self-storage is a recovering sector, poised to take off as long as the property is in the right location and the right growth market. “I think it’s a very attractive opportunity,” he says, notes that self-storage generates passive income through rental fees.
To be sure, allocations to real estate and its various sectors will no doubt change depending on market conditions and the attractiveness of non-real estate investments, but Yuan sees the sector as a solid bet for family offices over the long term.
“We see income-producing real estate as always being part of a family office’s investment mix,” he says.
Anna Sharratt is a business and health reporter and editor with more than 20 years of experience. Based in Toronto, she has written for Canadian Family Offices since 2021. A regular contributor to the Globe and Mail, she has written for Inc.com, Forbes, Business Insider, Canadian Business, MoneySense, the National Post, The Toronto Star and other publications. She is the former managing editor of smallbiz.ca, health editor of Chatelaine and senior health writer for the CBC.
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