The private owner of Hunter Express have acquired a 108,000-square-foot office building in the Airport Conference Centre in Mississauga, Ont., from Crown Realty Partners.

The property is located at 5750 Explorer Drive near Toronto Pearson International Airport. The sale price was not disclosed but a source with knowledge of the transaction told Connect that the property traded for $22.8 million, a 32% increase from the $17.4-million price that Crown paid.

Crown had planned to hold onto the asset after purchasing it in an off-market deal. But the real estate company changed its plans after being approached by Colliers about a possible off-market sale due to interest from some private investors.

Rather than doing an off-market deal, Crown chose to list the property through the advisory firm, Nicholas Kendrew, a Colliers senior vice-president based in Toronto. Crown and Colliers targeted owner-occupiers but ended up doing the deal with Hunter, which bought the mid-rise building for investment purposes.

Kendrew said Crown was able to capitalize on investor enthusiasm for the return-to-office movement that has begun to rejuvenate the office sector in recent months. Crown was also able to gain from its decision to target private investors, rather than fund managers and institutional pension funds, that have kept their capital on the sidelines rather than invest in the office market.

“I think what it demonstrates is continuing confidence in high quality, well located, suburban office assets,” said Kendrew.

The deal also demonstrates strong buyer in interest in high-quality, well-leased assets with good remaining lease terms anywhere in the GTA, he added.

After enduring considerable adversity from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic until the launch of the RTO movement, office is no longer the “bad boy” in the investment-grade real estate sector.

While office enjoys, probably, its best fundamentals of the decade, other highly sought-after asset classes, such as multi-family and industrial are experiencing headwinds of their own. That situation could bod well for the GTA office market, said Kendrew.

“You’ve got a population decline, and you’ve got the threats of tariffs, which are really impacting the values of those of industrial and apartment assets,” he said. ” So, I think, definitely, as we move further into 2026 we’re going to see a large uptick in [office] investors, not just the private investors that we talked about before, but also those institutional investors that have been on the sidelines.

“They’re now going to look closely at [central business district] and suburban office assets such as this [Airport Conference Centre building.]”

Between the 2008-09 global financial crisis and the pandemic, downtown Toronto office assets were considered a good investment story, according to Kendrew. Over the past year or two the tale turned and suburban assets were favoured. But now both central and suburban office assets are held in high regard.

The 18-year-old Airport Conference Centre building is anchored by the Canadian subsidiary of famed U.S.-based chocolate company Hershey, which occupies about 22,000 sf on the top floor.

“It’s a high-profile, five-storey office building in Mississauga that sits right on the 401 [freeway], with 400,000-plus cars per day that drive by,” said Scott Watson, Crown’s head of acquisitions and leasing, previously told Connect in an interview.

The LEED Silver-certified property was 78% leased when Crown purchased it. Other prominent tenants include Skygrid Construction and Bank of Montreal.