Amazon’s First Fulfillment Center in Quebec
Located in the borough of Lachine in Montreal, the new facility will commence operations in time for the 2020 holiday shopping season.
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.
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