A downtown Winnipeg office building that used to be home to more than 150 doctors is in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use, residential-heavy facility.
Construction has already begun on the Medical Arts Building to turn its 15 storeys of medical offices into 104 loft-style apartments with office and retail space on the lower two floors.
Colleen Krempulec, Toronto-based executive director of marketing at Timbercreek Asset Management, which bought the building for $15.5 million in 2017, said she expects to start marketing the building early in 2020.
Capital costs have not been released but it’s safe to say it’s a multimillion-dollar renovation.
“We’re taking it back to the studs,” she said, adding the changes will also include new elevators, new systems and infrastructure.
The building will have the usual apartment building amenities, including a fitness centre, a social room and a lobby.
There will be 39 one-bedroom units at an average of 677 square feet each and 65 two-bedroom units averaging 892 square feet plus 14,000 square feet of commercial. The units have yet to be priced. The target market is single and couple professionals looking to live downtown, Krempulec said.
The Medical Arts Building was only at half-occupancy when Timbercreek took it over. It is in the final stages of helping the last two doctor tenants find other office space.
This is Timbercreek’s seventh Winnipeg property. It has more than 22,000 apartment units across 250 buildings from coast to coast.
The conversion of the Medical Arts Building follows a similar transformation of an Edmonton office building into a multi-family rental building.
