Developers · Ottawa
Ottawa has two kinds of developer, and the register tells them apart
Seven in ten file every application on one day. The rest stage them over months. It is the clearest split in the city's own record, and it changes what a delay means.
There are 433 live development files in Ottawa's register today. They are not 433 projects.
Group them by the piece of land they are about and there are 333 sites. Eighty of those carry more than one application at once, because a single project routinely needs several: an official plan amendment to change what the land is for, a rezoning to change what may be built on it, a plan of subdivision to cut the lots, a site plan to approve the building itself.
That grouping is where the split appears.
Seven in ten file everything on one day
Of the eighty sites carrying multiple applications, fifty-five — sixty-nine per cent — filed every one of them on the same date. Not the same month. The same day.
The remaining twenty-five staged their filings over time, and for those the run from first application to last takes a median of 6.7 months, with a quarter of them past ten months and one at 29.
| sites | share | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed everything on one day | 55 | 69% |
| Staged over months | 25 | 31% |
These are two different operations, and the difference is not size.
A same-day bundle is a planner who has the whole scheme resolved before anything is submitted, and who knows the city will process the amendments together. It is a single decision, made once, and the paperwork is the output of that decision rather than the process of arriving at it.
Staging is the opposite: a rezoning first, then a look at what the rezoning produced, then a building drawn against the answer. It costs months and it buys optionality.
Which means a "delay" is two different things
This matters for anyone reading the register as a signal, because the same gap means opposite things depending on which kind of operator you are looking at.
For a bundler, a long gap after the filing is the city being slow. Everything the applicant controls has already happened.
For a stager, the same gap may be the applicant thinking. The file is not stuck; nobody has decided what to put on the land yet.
Counting only the steps with a real gap between them — a same-day pair has no direction, and including them makes "rezoning then site plan" and "site plan then rezoning" both look like common sequences — the register gives these:
| From | To | Months, median | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoning amendment | Site plan | 7.2 | 4 |
| Official plan amendment | Site plan | 7.3 | 4 |
| Official plan amendment | Zoning amendment | 10.5 | 4 |
Those n values are four. This is one register read on one day, not a market statistic, and anybody quoting the figure should quote the n beside it. We publish it because the shape is already clear and the shape is the useful part: getting from permission to a drawn building is roughly a seven-month step, and getting the plan changed first adds ten more.
And then there are the ones who stopped
The second list is shorter to describe and harder to look at.
One hundred and six sites in Ottawa have an entitlement on file and no site plan behind it. Someone went and asked the city to change what could be built on their land, got that far, and has not drawn a building. The oldest have been sitting for over two years:
| Site | Months since the last filing | Owner on the file |
|---|---|---|
| 1887 St Joseph Blvd | 29.3 | SDLP 1887 Orleans Limited |
| 4848 Bank St | 28.7 | Regional Group |
| 1034 McGarry Terr | 26.9 | Kionas Construction |
| 256 Rideau St | 25.8 | Ashcroft Homes |
| 1657 Carling Ave | 25.6 | Inside Edge Properties |
| 1822 Bank St | 23.1 | Sun Life Assurance |
Some of those are patient capital doing exactly what it intends. Some are schemes that stopped penciling when rates moved and have not been re-tested since. The register cannot tell you which, and we are not going to pretend it can.
What it can tell you is that the permission exists and the building does not, and that is a materially different position from a cold site. A rezoning already granted is the expensive half of the work, and it does not expire on the timescale a spreadsheet does.
Why we published this instead of a market report
Every number above came out of one public file that anybody can download, grouped by a rule written down in the open. No survey, no broker commentary, no proprietary panel.
The reason it has not been published before is not that it is hard. It is that reading 433 files by hand to find it is not work a person can reasonably do — which is precisely the kind of thing a machine should be pointed at.
The counting rule matters and is stated rather than assumed: homes are counted once per site, not once per file. Summing the register's units column instead — which is the obvious thing to do and which we did at first — overstates Ottawa's pipeline by 18,479 homes, because 4497 O'Keefe Court alone describes the same 1,493 homes across three separate applications. Forty-one per cent.
We would rather show you the rule and be argued with than show you a number and be trusted.