The Hanlon Creek Business Park is beginning to fill in. It is a gradual process.
The 675-acre mixed use property, much of it owned by the City of Guelph, has a number of new buildings going up, while others have been standing for two or three years.
The Würth Canada Limited building is among the more impressive on the site along the Hanlon Expressway. The sprawling, brilliant red building holds the headquarters and distribution facility of the company’s eastern Canada operations. It opened in 2014. Würth Canada is a leading distributor of fasteners, electrical connectors, tools and chemicals.
Builder Fusion Homes has its new headquarters further back on the property, as does Compass Private Wealth. Construction just got underway for the future home of Halwell Mutual Insurance Company, and there are a host of other medium-sized buildings spread across the land.
“It is filling up,” said Peter Cartwright, Guelph’s general manager of business development and enterprise. “We are half way through our first phase. Phase one was about 110 acres, and there are 55 acres sold.”
He said the city-owned land is selling from the high $200,000 to low $300,000 range per acre, depending on the size of the lot, location, and other factors.
“There are years where you do better than others,” Cartwright said, referring to lot sales. “But generally the pace is about what we anticipated it would be. We sell about eight to 10 acres a year.”
Nearly seven years ago, preliminary work was set to begin on the business zone when a group of about 30 environmental activists moved onto the land. That late July, 2009 occupation was an effort to protect former farmland that was thought to have significant water resources and wildlife habitat.
The occupation lasted 18 days, but delayed the work by about a year. A multi-million-dollar city-initiated lawsuit was brought against several of the participants, but it was eventually dropped. While the occupation itself was peaceful, subsequent actions – such as a large-scale protest at a sod-turning ceremony in the fall of 2009 – were more volatile.
The small creek that flows through the land continues to flow, but the overgrown farm fields are entirely gone now. Hanlon Creek Boulevard now cuts through the property where a field road once was.
“Würth is obviously the large one, but we are also seeing some local offices relocating down to the park,” Cartwright said. “Halwell Insurance is the most recent one. We have seen an international company come in, and a lot of local and regional companies that are interested.”
Phase 2 of the Hanlon Creek Business Park is owned by Cooper Construction, located south of Forestell Road.
The city’s next phase will be Phase 3 of the project, another roughly 110 acres in the corner section at Downey Road and Forestell Road. About 20 percent of the Phase 3 land is privately owned.
Cartwright said an agreement has been signed with a local company on three acres of the land, and negotiations are underway with two other perspective parties on another five acres. A number of other inquiries have been received, he added.
