TORONTO-A joint venture of Boston's Alcion Ventures and local partner Menkes Development has closed the $358 million sale of the 30-story Telus Tower, a 30-story, 780,000-square foot class A LEED Gold office project at 25 York St., to a Canadian pension fund. The sale consummates a contract entered into in 2005 with the pension fund.

Alcion Founding Partner Martin Zieff explains that the sale also reflects the strategy that the developers executed in building the Telus Tower, which is adjacent to the Air Canada Centre, with direct access to the Air Canada Centre galleria and Union Station.

“The investment thesis for 25 York was to pro-actively take advantage of the low vacancies that existed in the Toronto office market in 2005," Zieff says. He points out that the market at the time was dominated by large tenants and a few institutional landlords, and had not delivered a new office building since the early 1990s; the average age of standing inventory was more than 30 years.

"Tenants were looking to expand or consolidate, or simply wanted new and more efficient space," Zieff says. The Alcion-Menkes venture designed the building to offer new technology and "the competitive advantage of being the low-cost provider," he adds. He says that Alcion and Menkes "unlocked the development log-jam" by launching the building on a speculative basis and thereafter securing Telus as a lead tenant.

The property features 30,000 square feet of ground floor retail space, a three-level underground parking garage with 270 parking stalls, and conference and wellness facilities. Additionally, the building will house Future FriendlyTM technology in both building automation systems and tenant environments, with raised floors to facilitate under-floor distribution of cooling/heating systems, communications cabling and electrical power, as well as floor-to-ceiling windows.