Commercial real estate finance firm Canada ICI Capital Corp. has solidified its presence as a coast-to-coast firm by opening new offices in Halifax and Victoria.

“We’ve always wanted to be a coast-to-coast company and have a coast-to-coast local presence,” Saeid Khan, vice-president, origination and strategic initiatives at Canada ICI, told RENX.

The expansion into Victoria was a natural progression from Vancouver, where the company opened an office in 2022.

“It’s extremely important to have local on-the-ground presence and to have a large enough team per market to cover that market,” Khan says. “It’s about having skin in the game and having a physical office presence in each of these offices.”

Opening an office in Halifax made sense given the large purpose-built rental housing market in the city and Atlantic region, says Khan, who was a major accounts manager at CoStar Group before joining Canada ICI.

The multifamily residential land sector 

Khan notes 80 per cent of Canada ICI’s business is in multifamily residential and “this is a natural progression of where the industry is going and what buildings are actually getting financed in the market today.”

Canada ICI is a CMHC-approved lender that specializes in financing commercial real estate. “CMHC multifamily financing is really what kept the lights on and the party going for the entire industry for the last little while.”

While every market is different, affordable housing is needed across the country, he says.

“We’ve been advancing affordable housing across all of these communities, advancing multifamily, purpose-bult rental to get that stock and supply in the market that’s so needed.” 

Office isn’t an asset category many lenders want to finance, he says, but “there is a lot of opportunity with office conversions that we’re looking at in all the regions, and have been successful in financing in Alberta.”

The company has more than 150 employees and offices in most major Canadian cities. 

A plan to continuing expanding

Strategically, Regina, Saskatoon and Quebec City would be the next cities in which the company would open new offices, Khan says. Offices in those cities could open in the next few years.

As an Alberta-based company that started in Edmonton in 1993, “we do three out of four loans in that market,” he says. Most recently, Canada ICI provided construction financing for a mixed-use, 45-unit multifamily building with about 8,200 square feet of main-floor retail space in the Keswick neighbourhood of Edmonton.

The staff size of the Toronto office has grown 90 per cent over the last year, he says. In Montreal, Canada ICI expanded its operations this month with the addition of Brian Faddoul, Frédérik Roux and Alexandre Caron-Brulotte, all from the Quebec firm PMML.

Mack Carson, Yvan Repka and Dustin Lamoureux make up the Victoria office.

Carson joined Canada ICI in 2016 and originally worked out of its Edmonton office. During his career, he has been involved in placing more than $750 million in commercial mortgages on behalf of private investors, developers, REITs, and private equity firms.

Repka has worked as a commercial lender for the Bank of Montreal and has coordinated more than $3 billion of construction, bridge and term financing for clients ranging from institutional borrowers to private entrepreneurs. 

Lamoureux has about 20 years of experience and was previously a mortgage broker with TMG The Mortgage Group for 10 years in the city.

The new Halifax team

The Halifax team has more than 100 years of experience, topped by the 43 years of commercial real estate financing by Glenn Umlah, who was senior vice-president in the debt and structured finance group at CBRE in Halifax.

Ian MacInnis, another team member, has 40 years of business and financial experience and has worked in multiple senior banking roles with three banks, including BMO.

Other team members are Matthew Dobbelsteyn, who spent 17 years in senior roles at TD Bank, and Geoff Umlah, who previously worked in Halifax with CBRE for seven years and Montrose Mortgage Corp. for seven years. 

Canada ICI annually arranges more than $9 billion in financing and funds - an average of more than three loans every business day. 

Khan says loan sizes range from $10 to $200 million: “We’re playing in the mid-market to larger borrowers target market.”

Aside from Victoria and Halifax, Canada ICI has offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Winnipeg.