Article
New Brokerage Team Positions CBRE for Maximum Service in Quebec City
July 8, 2024 3 Minute Read
Patrick Soucy, William Grenon, Maxime Paquet and Maxime St-Pierre now call CBRE home. That’s a game changer for real estate services in Quebec City.
And it’s all happening in a great location, with CBRE getting set to open a new office at Place de la Cité on Laurier Boulevard in Quebec City.
“This is a great day for our clients in Quebec City,” says CBRE Quebec Managing Director Louis Karam. “We have the best real estate advisors under one roof and will be able to offer our industry-leading standard of real estate services in what is largely considered to be Canada’s most under-serviced commercial real estate market.”
The new recruits give CBRE diverse coverage across the commercial real estate market. “We are turning Quebec City CBRE green,” says Soucy, who moved back to the city, his hometown, in 2012 to set up an office for a competing real estate services firm.
He notes that his team offers expertise in office and industrial tenant representation, office and industrial landlord representation, investment sales, building and land disposals, and sales and leaseback. In the last eight years the team has completed 600 transactions, representing a total of 5.7 million square feet and a value of $480 million.
Perfect Match
Soucy and his team will be joining forces with CBRE Vice President Philippe Lambert, who’s been on the Quebec City brokerage team since 2015, along with a market-leading Valuations and Advisory Services team and a Debt and Structured Finance team, which CBRE added last fall.
It wasn’t an easy decision to move on from the company where he’d worked for 17 years, Soucy says, but he saw CBRE as having “all the tools we really needed to grow our business and up our game further. Philippe is doing well and our joining forces with him should make for a perfect match.”
“We want to be even better and grow the corporate side of our brokerage in Quebec City,” adds Grenon. “CBRE was the best place for us to achieve that.”
Quebec City is one of the last big markets in Canada that doesn’t have a substantial commercial brokerage presence, Grenon points out. “Most transactions here are done by tenants themselves. They don’t use commercial brokerage. They are assuming so much risk and missing out on vital information and cost savings, but we look forward to changing that.”
“We are now able to offer a fuller scope of services to our clients, with Patrick’s brokerage team joining me and our existing VAS and DSF teams,” Lambert says. “No one else in Quebec City can offer this breadth of services. CBRE is truly a one-stop shop.”
“Philippe and his team have done a great job positioning us for success in Quebec City,” Karam adds, “and now with the merger of these two powerhouses our clients will experience a new standard for real estate outcomes.”
Believing in Quebec City
Grenon says Quebec City is often seen by investors as a small village or a suburb of Montreal. “That’s why it was important for us to be with a company that believes in Quebec City and the growth that is possible here, and that wants to focus its efforts on fueling that growth.”
Opportunity abounds in Quebec City, which has emerged as a tech hub in recent years. The city’s industrial market has plenty of upside; Lambert brokered a deal that saw Immostar build a 122,000 sq. ft. distribution centre for PepsiCo Canada, the largest transaction in Quebec City in 2023.
Lambert says private capital investment has been picking up in Quebec City, too. “I’ve been doing a lot of small investment deals lately.” And high-density multifamily development has been gathering steam, as well.
“We are in a great position to offer Quebec City clients unprecedented opportunities to seize the moment in this rapidly evolving market,” Karam says. “Patrick, William, Maxime Paquet and Maxime St-Pierre add serious octane to the operation Philippe and his group have helped establish in Quebec City.
“I’m excited to see where this dream team will take us.”
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