Amazon’s First Fulfillment Center in Quebec

Image courtesy of Amazon

Amazon will soon enter new territory in Canada. The e-commerce giant has revealed plans to open its first fulfillment center in Quebec. The company has selected the borough of Lachine in Montreal for the site of the new project.

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Among the limited number of details Amazon has disclosed about the facility is the fact that it will create more than 300 new full-time positions involving the picking, packing and shipping of items. Amazon has a range of different facility types, including sortable fulfillment centers, which are typically roughly 800,000 square feet in size, and non-sortable fulfillment centers, which range in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet. Amazon expects to bring the new Lachine property online in time to accommodate the 2020 holiday shopping season.

It is unclear if Amazon has commissioned a build-to-suit facility or leased an existing property to house the new fulfillment center in Lachine. However, given the current state of the industrial market in Montreal, any company seeking large-scale industrial space would find limited availabilities. The total vacancy rate in the Greater Montreal area is just 2.8 percent, according to a third quarter 2019 report by JLL, and the vast majority of the nearly 2.7 million square feet currently under construction consists of either build-to-suit or owner-occupied projects.

Expansion in the True North

While the Lachine facility will be Amazon’s first fulfillment center in Quebec, it will be one of a growing number of Amazon properties in Canada. Amazon is currently awaiting the 2020 completion of a 1 million-square-foot customer fulfillment facility in Leduc County in Metropolitan Edmonton, Alberta. The company signed a build-to-suit lease with developers One Properties and TD Greystone Asset Management in December 2018. During the same month, Amazon opened a 113,000-square-foot office in a building owned by KingSett Capital and Alberta Investment Management Corp. in downtown Toronto. Additionally, according to a Montreal Gazette article published earlier this year, Amazon may be planning to invest as much as $1 billion in projects in Quebec over a 10-year period.