Intermarket Properties has developed three buildings at its 80-acre IP Park in Cambridge, a city just west of Toronto, and is ready to launch three additional buildings at the site.

Intermarket assembled, zoned and serviced the lands to create the IP Park master plan. The site is conveniently close to highways 401 and 8 and will host approximately 1.5 million square feet of industrial and data centre uses in 15 buildings when complete.

Intermarket previously sold adjacent land to Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan for its four-million-square-foot-plus iPort Cambridge logistics and industrial campus. Fengate and Dream also own neighbouring industrial properties, while there’s also a Loblaws distribution centre, an Amazon facility and a Toyota manufacturing plant nearby.

“We’re small-bay industrial with nothing over 150,000 square feet, and the big players around us are all large distribution centres,” Intermarket development manager Xavier Kindrachuk told RENX, adding that IP Park’s first three completed buildings on Boychuk Drive were all under 120,000 square feet.

IP Park’s first three buildings are finished

Angstrom Engineering purchased one of them and the other two are leased. A deal for 44,974 square feet was just signed with a business unit of HongSheng Thermal Systems at 140 Boychuk Dr.

“The lenders that we’ve been using have been really happy with us because our projects have all come under budget and been completed before we initially thought,” Kindrachuk said.

IP Park is in relatively close proximity to numerous restaurants and retail outlets while a future Grand River Transit bus stop and GO Transit station will provide convenient access to the site.

The IP Park master plan was also created with an integrated trail system that links its green spaces, including wetlands, a wood lot and a potential park. It also includes a number of environmental, social and governance initiatives to promote project sustainability and tenant wellness.

200 Intermarket Rd. and 155 Boychuk Dr.

IP Park’s second phase will be comprised of: 200 Intermarket Rd., which is being represented by JLL; 155 Boychuk Dr., which is being represented by CBRE; and 175 Boychuk Dr., which is being represented by Cushman & Wakefield.

The 200 Intermarket site will be the first to break ground, with construction of an 85,878-square-foot industrial building to begin construction in May. It will have a 24-foot clear height, eight truck-level doors, eight drive-in doors and 201 parking stalls.

The building will be demisable into units of 15,000 square feet and above. Two letters of intent have been signed to lease 56 per cent of the building.

The 155 Boychuk building will be approximately 150,000 square feet and demisable into smaller units. It will have a 28-foot clear height, 10 truck-level doors, two drive-in doors, outdoor storage space and 258 car parking stalls.

“There’s not very many 400,000- or 500,000-square-foot users out there,” Intermarket founder and president Mark Kindrachuk, Xavier’s father, told RENX in a separate interview.

“A lot of the local firms are now 15,000 to 45,000 square feet, and that’s where 80 per cent of the deals are done in our market of Waterloo Region.”

Construction won’t start on IP Park’s next two buildings until they’ve been leased due to the current uncertain economic environment and the caution of lenders, according to Xavier Kindrachuk.

Data centre at 175 Boychuk Dr.

Intermarket will create the shell for a build-to-suit data centre at 175 Boychuk, where an unnamed third party has been hired to build the interior.

Intermarket is proposing 80,000 square feet for a one-storey building and 160,000 square feet for a two-storey option. Fifteen megawatts of power will be available in the first quarter of 2027.

Intermarket previously sold five acres of adjacent land to GrandBridge Energy, which provides electricity to the area. It will build a transformer station, which will have 100-megawatt capacity by 2028, to provide power to the data centre.

The site is adjacent to the existing Waterloo Region water tower, which will provide water to cool the data centre. There are also five fibre providers in the area.

Advantageous data centre location

“We have power, we have fibre, we have water and we’re in Waterloo Region, which is a technology hot spot, so we’ve pivoted to really focus on data centres now,” said Mark Kindrachuk. “We’ve refined our marketing program to really drill down on the data centre opportunity because we have competitive advantages on our site.”

Mark Kindrachuk added that Intermarket has reached an agreement with the Region of Waterloo to enable the excess heat produced from IP Park’s data centre to be used to heat adjacent buildings. Consultants and engineers are studying how to carry that out, he noted.

“Our anticipation is that once we finish our first data centre project, and with the new transformer built, we will move forward with some other data centres,” Xavier Kindrachuk said. “Most of the sites are zoned for data centre use.”

Toronto-based Intermarket is a real estate development and management company established by Mark Kindrachuk in 1997 that has development, investment, and advisory and consulting business units.

The company has private investors and has been involved with a variety of projects over the years. IP Park is its current priority.

“We are not institutionally funded and we don’t have any pension plans supporting us,” Xavier Kindrachuk explained. “We like to be nimble.

“We like to be able to pivot quickly and we don’t typically want that much bureaucracy making decisions for us.”