I’ve been wondering who are the real estate magnates in Montreal for a while. I have spent a few weeks this Summer scraping data and I have some interesting results that I want to share with you today.

Data

We use two data sources:

  • The shape of all the lots in Montreal (more than 500 000) are available as open data on Montreal’s open data website. This is awesome and we will use it to build maps.
  • The owner and value of each lot had to be scraped from city’s EvalWeb website individually. This involves breaking a (thankfully weak) captcha and letting a robot run every night for a month.

Some trial and error was required when deciding whether two properties have the same owner. I consider that two properties had the same owner if the postal adresse to reach the owner is the same for both properties. My initial plan was to use the owner’s name, but a single individual can generate 15 companies to buy 15 different properties and evade the “by name” grouping. I tried to use the name most known by the public when merging different buildings using a different name. Some properties have the same postal address, but really belong to different persons, such as those managed by the “curateur public du québec”. Some very large companies also register their buildings under different postal addresses - these companies were merged by hand.

There definitely could still be errors in the data.

edit: I found an error with CN railroads. They were considered “government” which they arent. The updated map below shows them as the 2nd largest private owner.

Results and maps

It turns out that Montreal is mostly owned by the public Only Cominar appears in the top 8, reaching 5th place thanks to a total of 1.7 billion dollars worth of real property.

Table 1: Top 8 owners, overall
rang nom_principal_a_cette_adresse valeur_immeuble_total area_total
1 VILLE DE MONTREAL 11 160 024 885 50 691 002
2 IVANHOÉ CAMBRIDGE 2 545 496 700 155 926
3 COMMISSION SCOLAIRE DE MONTREAL 2 085 648 903 1 974 711
4 GOUVERNEMENT FEDERAL MINS DES TRANSPORTS 1 801 740 506 10 132 723
5 FONDS DE PLACEMENT IMMOBILIER COMINAR 1 731 749 402 1 730 168
6 CENTRE UNIVERSITAIRE DE SANTE MCGILL 1 575 734 100 237 078
7 CENTRE HOSPITALIER DE L’UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL CSL 1 475 989 200 59 309
8 OFFICE MUNICIPAL D’HABITATION DE MONTREAL 1 251 870 601 698 671

Removing owners from the 3 levels of governemnt (including ‘commission scolaires’, hospitals,universities ) we find the big private players.

Table 2: Top 8 owners, overall
rang nom_principal_a_cette_adresse valeur_immeuble_total area_total
5 FONDS DE PLACEMENT IMMOBILIER COMINAR 1 731 749 402 1 730 168
12 COMPAGNIE DES CHEMINS DE FER NATIONAUX DU CANADA 811 435 409 6 993 907
14 CAPREIT APARTMENTS INC. 758 923 701 241 605
16 MARKBOROUGH PROPERTIES INC 738 836 400 352 196
20 GROUPE PETRA LTEE 623 254 900 458 622
23 COMPAGNIE DE CHEMIN DE FER CANADIEN PACIFIQUE 552 728 406 4 956 072
24 AKELIUS MONTREAL LTD. 524 232 600 85 614
26 SOCIETE EN COMMANDITE ST-LAURENT BOARDWALK 480 175 000 359 751

Conclusion

Wow - there really are some big players in Montreal. I didnt make all my data available this time because I don’t want to make people’s addresses and names more easily available than what the City of Montreal already did.

Do you have any ideas how this data could be used for good? Let me know!

You may also be interested in a similar project I did to find out if anyone is speculating on the third bridge in Québec City (spoiler: someone is.)