It may not look like much from the outside right now, but the former Sault Area Hospital property, which has been boarded up since it closed two years ago, is the site of a development project that will soon offer new residential opportunities for Sault Ste. Marie.
TVM Group, a property developer based in Toronto, purchased the site last August, and is redeveloping the 20-acre waterfront property into luxury condominiums.
Details are still fluid, but TVM president Amit Sofer said the development will be similar in scope to a project the company is undertaking in Peterborough.
There, the company purchased the former St. Joseph Hospital campus in the east end of the city. TVM is currently converting the building into 30 residential suites on the second and fourth floors, along with a commercial space on the ground floor, which will house Community Care Peterborough. The building and its suites will be fully accessible.
“We’re going to be doing high-end luxury condos in Sault Ste. Marie, not unlike what we did in Peterborough except for a few significant differences,” Sofer said. “The intention would be to have the highest-end condo product there.”
Little interest had been shown in the Sault hospital property, which was originally listed in 2011 at $4.9 million. Last May, the hospital’s board of directors announced it was letting the property go for a drastically reduced rate of $65,000.
At the time, hospital board chair Jamie Melville said the cost to maintain the buildings until they could be sold was too significant. Demolition costs alone had been estimated at between $2.5 and $5 million.
“A guaranteed modest return now is much preferable to potentially significant costs in the near future,” Melville said.
In preparation for construction, demolition and remediation work has begun on the site, which includes two buildings (the former General Hospital and Plummer Memorial Hospital), encompassing 400,000 square feet of built space. Environmental approval work is also ongoing, Sofer said.
Though the company hasn’t found any unique challenges at the site, Sofer said care has to be taken when dealing with some of the more noxious substances that have been discovered.
“There’s a huge amount of asbestos and a few other substances on different areas of the property,” he said. “There used to be a tank farm on the south central section of the lot, so there’s some contamination there, but other than that, it’s not our first project, so we’re pretty familiar with what to expect and there have been no surprises there.”
Sofer said once construction gets underway, there will be employment opportunities for local tradespeople.
“We absolutely always have a high preference on having subtrades to be local,” Sofer said, “and we’ll be putting out to tender any and all contracts to the local market and only bringing in outside labour if our contractors prove to be more efficient, inclusive of lodging and transportation costs.”
Though he wasn’t able to offer a firm timeline for when construction might start, Sofer said details are emerging and updates on the project should be forthcoming.
TVM currently owns and manages 25 properties in Ontario. The company’s portfolio includes roughly 600,000 square feet of commercial property, as well as close to 600 residential units in Toronto, Peterborough, Port Hope and Coburg. The Sault Ste. Marie property is its first in Northern Ontario.
