A major Canadian shopping centre owner wants to combine shopping with shelter as it aims to add residential developments to its malls.

Quebec City-based Cominar has been negotiating with municipalities for zoning permission to build homes around its shopping hubs, a company official told CoStar News.

Cominar is a former real estate investment trust that became a slimmed-down privately held company in late 2021 after being bought by a group led by Canderel.

Cominar retained some Quebec retail properties, including such malls as Rockland Shopping Centre, Alexis Nihon Plaza and Central Station in Montreal, Centropolis and Centre Laval in Laval, as well as the Champlain Mall in the Montreal suburb of Brossard and the Galeries de Hull in Gatineau.

“The mid-to-long-term plan would be to densify these assets while keeping the existing retail properties,” said Enzo Cocquerel, Cominar’s senior corporate finance adviser, in an interview. “This is the process we have been involved in over the last two years and it’s going to continue going forward. We’re working with cities to get zoning and to get the ability to build residential.”

Cocquerel declined to offer a timeline for the advancement of the initiative but he noted that all of Cominar's retail properties have development potential.

Some of Cominar’s properties appear to have more space to grow than others. Alexis Nihon Plaza already contains 900 apartments units above its 400,000-square-foot shopping complex, whereas the Centropolis in Laval, a sprawling 550,000-square-foot retail space, has far more area to accommodate new homes.

The effort might not be easy to accomplish, as a pair of other attempts to add housing to Quebec shopping centres were rejected by their local municipalities. The Town of Mount Royal blocked Carbonleo’s proposal to add housing to its upcoming Royalmount Mall, while Pointe Claire did the same to Cadillac Fairview's plan to add homes to its Fairview Pointe Claire shopping centre.

Cominar has kept a low profile since a group purchased its properties in one of the largest real estate deals in Canadian history.

The purchasers included Canderel, Artis REIT, Sandpiper Group, Koch Real Estate Investments, with Mach Group acquiring some office and retail properties and Blackstone buying the industrial portfolio.

As part of the deal, Cominar’s trustees were replaced by Alex Avery, Renzo Barazzuol, Navdeep Gill, Stephen Loukas, Samir Manji, Brett Miller, Ben Rodney, Ryan Ross and Jonathan Wener.

Cominar maintained a number of properties after the sale and its portfolio now comprises 22 properties, according to its website.

Cominar's recent transactions include the sale of a 105,000-square-foot office property at 3175 des Quatre Bourgeois in Quebec City that sold for $12 million. The building is located in the west end Ste. Foy district of Quebec City near the Duplessis HIghway, a major thoroughfare.

Sandra Lécuyer, chief culture and brand officer for Cominar, told CoStar News in an interview that its recent public update was partially designed to remind people that Cominar remains a force on the Canadian real estate scene after the buyout.

“People thought Cominar didn't exist anymore, so that is stating that we’re alive and well and have projects forthcoming,” Lécuyer said.