Office, retail, and mixed-use across Ontario.

What commercial covers

CRESI’s commercial practice spans three broad categories:

• Office — space leased or purchased for business operations.
• Retail — storefront and customer-facing commercial space.
• Mixed-use — properties combining commercial space with other uses, such as residential units above ground-floor retail.

Whether you’re buying, selling, or negotiating a lease as tenant or landlord, the starting point is the same conversation: what the space needs to do for your business, and where.

Site selection

Site selection weighs a property’s location, visibility, accessibility, and surrounding uses against what your business actually needs from a space — foot traffic for a retail location, proximity to clients or transit for an office, or the mix of uses that makes a mixed-use property work. Zoning and permitted use are part of this from the start: confirming that a property is zoned for your intended use, or understanding what it would take to change that, is a site selection question as much as a due-diligence one.

Lease negotiation

Commercial leases are negotiated documents, not standard forms, and the same core terms come up on either side of the table:

• Term length and renewal rights — how long the lease runs, and whether either party has an option to extend it.
• Rent structure — base rent plus, in many commercial leases, a share of the property’s operating costs (sometimes called additional rent or triple-net charges), rather than a single flat figure.
• Repair and maintenance responsibility — which party is responsible for what, both inside the leased space and for shared building systems.
• Assignment and subletting rights — whether and how a tenant can transfer the lease if its business needs change.
• Tenant improvements — work done to fit out the space for a specific tenant’s use, and who funds it.

Where a specific lease should land on any of these depends on the property, the market, and both parties’ priorities — this page describes what’s negotiated, not what any given deal should look like.

How commercial differs from residential

A commercial transaction runs a broadly similar shape to a residential one — offer, conditions, closing — but with meaningfully more to confirm along the way:

• Due diligence goes further. Beyond a property’s physical condition, a commercial purchase typically involves confirming title, zoning and permitted use, reviewing any existing leases and tenant arrangements, and assessing environmental condition — commonly through an environmental site assessment. None of that is part of a typical residential purchase.
• Financing is evaluated differently. Commercial lenders generally weigh a property’s own income-generating potential — its net operating income and how comfortably that covers debt service — more heavily than comparable sales, and commercial mortgages typically call for a larger buyer equity contribution than a residential one. Terms vary by lender and property type.
• Timelines tend to run longer. The additional due-diligence steps above — environmental assessment, lease and title review, zoning confirmation — each add time, so a commercial closing timeline is often longer than a comparable residential one, though the specific timeline depends on the property and what due diligence turns up.

Building a rental portfolio instead?

This page is about occupying or leasing commercial space directly. If you’re looking to build a long-term investment portfolio instead, see Invest.

Looking for something specific?

For what’s actually for sale or available to lease right now, see Live Listings to search current Ontario listings on the RE/MAX portal. For a residential purchase or sale, see Residential or Buy & Sell.

Ready to talk?

Tell us what your business needs — a location, a lease negotiated, or a commercial property to buy or sell — and CRESI, RE/MAX Hallmark, will follow up.