Canadian National Railway will relocate its headquarters to a major Kevric Real Estate Corporation office redevelopment project in downtown Montreal.

The property, known as 600 DLG, is located at 600 De La Gauchetière West, north of Square Victoria in the International Quarter. The redevelopment project is underway.

CN will occupy the building’s first 18 floors under a 20-year lease. The space totals about 440,000 square feet. The company will officially start occupying the building in 2028, with some departments moving in beforehand in 2026.

In the first of a multi-part interview, Sébastien Hylands, vice-president of development for Montreal-based Kevric, tells Connect why the company purchased the property and pursued the lease deal with CN.

When did Kevric purchase the property?

We acquired the building in the summer of 2019. The building was built in 1983 by National Bank, so they built their own headquarters. And, we basically bought it knowing that that the building was going to be emptied out and knowing that we will do a full transformation of the building, which we prepared and planned up until the summer of 2022.

Aside from knowing that National Bank was going to move out, why did you want to redevelop the building?

The property is interesting. Quartier International was built out in the early 2000s, and the building was essentially built 20 years before Quartier International was ever built or even a concept. So, there were a lot of possibilities on this building, because National Bank never did a massive transformation, and everything around it evolved significantly over those 40 years.

We’ve done the Air Canada tower that is right across the street. The metro goes into that district of downtown. So, we definitely saw an opportunity there to reposition this building at a much faster timeline than a new development would be.

[We’re] having a much smaller environmental impact, because you’re not doing a new construction where you have a lot of carbon emissions from doing excavation work from putting up a new structure and everything related to all that heavy construction work.

We really felt that we were able to transform this building to the equivalent of a newly built office tower in, essentially, the best location in terms of a business district and with phenomenal, accessibility with a shorter timeframe.

It’s not for everyone. Because this really is our niche expertise, of being able to do very deep transformations in real estate, we really saw this opportunity because, essentially, National Bank was leaving.

We had a lot of vacancy, which we could forecast back in 2019, which allowed us to do massive transformation work. Which includes, essentially, doubling the amount of windows that are on the building. It really changes how the occupants of the building are going to be living in that space and occupying that space, because it definitely is going to be in no way, shape, or form the former building that it was when we bought it in 2019.

How did the deal with CN come about?

The project has been three years in the making. We had the opportunity three years ago of actually pitching our concept and our vision for the tower to the organization. They knew that they had a lease coming up. And, that for them to be able to do a move, they would need to do a move that is plenty worthwhile for them, and that aligns with their vision of the future and what the organization itself needed to deliver to both its investors and its employees and things like that.

What we knew and were very confident about is that, given the office environment at that point in time, there was no new product that was either going to be coming online or that was going to make any financial sense.

They saw the thoroughness of our redevelopment and were able to see that we were really delivering, to downtown Montreal, a brand new office tower that is going to align with, for example, what National Bank has just completed and is starting to move into.

They saw that they also had a very specific requirements around making sure that their their headquarters is actually sealed from a security point of view. I mean, we are talking about a very large Canadian organization, and this is a headquarters. So, security is extremely important.

We were able to design our whole project around making sure that all their floors were contiguous in that they have their own access from the lobby, to be able to go into a dedicated elevator core … so that all of the CN floors are basically serviced by one elevator bank which will become 100% dedicated to them.

So, there was a lot of back and forth around [Kevric] understanding their needs, but also them understanding what their needs were, because they’ve been in their building ever since it was built in 1961.

An organization needs to build a full picture of what works, and what they need to make sure they keep having if they’re going to consider relocating somewhere else. That’s a long exercise and it’s been an exercise where every single meeting in the negotiation took place in person, because we really needed to build that confidence together and build that mutual understanding, but also give ourselves the chance to be able to ask the proper questions and make sure what what their needs were and propose solutions.

That’s why that negotiation and putting together that project took three years, But it was a very beneficial exercise for both groups, because it really allows nailing this project, really, to their specific needs. But we really strongly believe we would not have been able to get such a strong result if we weren’t doing all these meetings in person and through face-to-face conversations.

Did you have a lot of meetings in CN’s offices?

No, we would actually meet in our project showroom to go through those discussions. Confidentiality was really key in putting together that project.

Rendering: Courtesy of Kevric Corporation

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