Three of my drives on Tuesday ended up somewhere that was not the fairway. One found the trees. One found a completely different hole. The third, we don’t talk about.
Our team won the tournament anyway.
The event was a charity scramble supporting the Miriam Foundation, an organization that works with people living with autism and neurodevelopmental disabilities across the Montreal region. It was a good day for a good cause, and I contributed almost nothing to the scorecard.
That turned out to be the most useful thing about it. Because the way a scramble works is exactly the way a commercial real estate transaction works — and most people running a deal in Montreal are still trying to play it alone.
Here’s what the round made obvious.
In a Scramble, the Team Plays the Best Ball
For anyone who doesn’t golf: in a scramble format, all four players hit. Then the team picks the single best shot, everyone moves their ball to that spot, and you all hit again from there. Repeat until the ball is in the hole.
The math of that is worth sitting with. You are never penalized for your worst shot. You are only ever rewarded for your team’s best one.
So a player like me — inconsistent off the tee, fine on the green — is not a liability. Because someone else on the team drives 280 straight, and my job becomes something narrower and more useful. I stop trying to be good at everything and start being good at the one thing the team actually needs from me.
That is not a golf insight. That is an operating model.
Commercial Deals Are Scrambles, Not Solo Rounds
A stroke-play round is a solo effort. Every mistake you make is on your card, permanently.
A lot of people approach buying or leasing industrial property the same way. They try to be the broker, the analyst, the lawyer, the lender and the construction manager all at once, because bringing in help feels like an admission that they can’t do it themselves.
Then the deal reveals what it actually requires.
A Phase II environmental assessment comes back with something on it. The zoning in that Saint-Laurent submarket doesn’t permit the use they had planned. The lender wants an appraisal that assumes a different tenant profile. The tenant improvement budget was estimated from a Google search and turns out to be off by 40%.
None of those are failures of intelligence. They are failures of coverage. Every one of them is a hole where somebody else’s best shot was needed and nobody else was on the tee.
Who’s Actually on a Good Deal Team
The industrial and commercial transactions I’ve seen go smoothly in Montreal, Laval and on the Rive-Sud almost always have the same cast around the table. Not the same people — the same roles.
The broker who knows the submarket, not just the listing. There’s a difference between someone who can send you what’s available and someone who can tell you why the building on the corner has been vacant for eighteen months.
A lawyer who has already seen your specific problem. Environmental conditions, servitudes, tenant estoppels, holdover clauses. Generalist counsel will get you there eventually. Counsel who has done twenty industrial closings gets you there in half the time and catches the thing you didn’t ask about.
A lender who understands the asset class. Financing an owner-occupied warehouse is a different conversation than financing a multi-tenant flex building. On Bank of Canada terms, in this rate environment, the difference between a lender who gets it and one who doesn’t is real money over the amortization.
A contractor who prices honestly. Not the cheapest number. The number that survives contact with the building. If your TI estimate moves 30% after demolition starts, your whole return model was fiction.
An accountant who models the hold, not just the purchase. Buy versus lease is a tax question as much as a real estate question, and it looks different for an owner-user than for an investor.
Five roles. Nobody fills more than one of them well.
The Uncomfortable Part: Knowing What You’re Not Good At
Here’s what I actually took from the round, and it’s less flattering than the version where teamwork wins.
I knew going in that my driving was going to be a problem. I didn’t hide it. The team adjusted — I hit last on the tee where it didn’t matter, and they put me on the short putts where I’m reliable. Because I named the weakness early, it stopped being a weakness and became a scheduling decision.
That is the part most people skip. Building a team isn’t just collecting good people. It’s being honest about where you’re exposed so the people around you can actually cover it.
I’ve watched buyers lose good industrial assets because they wouldn’t admit they didn’t understand the zoning. I’ve watched tenants sign leases with escalation clauses they never read, because asking felt like weakness. The cost of pretending is always higher than the cost of asking.
The best clients I work with are unusually comfortable saying "I don’t know this part — who should I talk to?" They close faster and they overpay less. Every time.
What This Means If You’re Buying, Leasing or Investing Right Now
The Montreal industrial market is not a market where you can improvise. Availability is tighter than it was, pricing has moved, and the gap between a well-structured deal and a poorly-structured one is wider than most people realize until they’re two years into a hold.
So before you look at a single building, take inventory:
- Which of the five roles above do you already have covered by someone you trust?
- Which ones are you currently filling yourself by default?
- Which of those are you actually qualified to fill?
The gaps in that list are your risk. Not the market. Not the rate. The gaps.
Fill them before you need them, not during due diligence when the clock is running.
Our team won because three people were good at the things I’m not. That’s the whole story. The trophy has my name on it and I earned about a quarter of it, and I’d rather have a quarter of a win than all of a loss.
Same applies to your next property. You don’t need to know everything about industrial real estate in Montreal. You need to know which shots you can take, and who to put on the tee for the rest.
If you’re weighing a purchase, a lease or an investment on the island, in Laval or on the South Shore and you’re not sure who should be around your table — reach out. Happy to walk through it, whether or not there’s a deal in it for me.
And if you have a chance to support the Miriam Foundation, do. They do good work.