When the former Wawanesa Insurance headquarters at 1010 St-George Boulevard went quiet, it was the kind of asset that gives owners pause: a mid-size, single-tenant suburban office building in a market where office demand had softened. The best outcome wasn’t another office tenant — it was a different use entirely. Here’s how a vacant headquarters became 30 affordable homes for seniors — the first, and to date the only, office-to-residential conversion of this scale in the Moncton area.
The building
The property runs about 31,740 square feet over three floors, on a 1.56-acre site with ample parking, close to the highway and to existing residential density — including seniors’ housing. As a single-tenant office building of its era, re-tenanting it as-is would have been a slow, uphill lease. But its bones told a different story.
Why it converted so well
Read structurally, the building already behaved like an apartment block. At roughly 72 feet wide, a single central corridor naturally split the floor plate into front and rear units — the same logic as a residential building. Large windows on both elevations meant genuine natural light in nearly every prospective unit. It already had a lobby and an elevator, and a code-friendly exit stair at each end. In other words, the expensive, deal-killing parts of a conversion — floor-plate geometry, egress, light, and vertical circulation — were already there. That’s what turns a "maybe" conversion into a viable one.
ONE.’s role
ONE. Commercial was retained as the vendor’s broker. The value we added wasn’t simply listing the building — it was recognizing its residential potential and matching it to the one buyer positioned to execute. We identified Rising Tide, a local non-profit developer actively building affordable units across Moncton, as the ideal prospect. Pairing the right building with the right developer is what turned a vacant office into housing rather than a listing that lingered.
The outcome
The sale closed in late 2024 at a publicly reported $3.3 million. Rising Tide is converting the building into 30 affordable one-bedroom units for seniors — part of a roughly $8.5-million project supported by municipal, provincial, and federal funding — with a medical clinic planned for the lower level to serve residents in the area. The conversion is now nearing completion, answering real and measured demand: hundreds of Moncton-area seniors sit on the province’s housing waitlist.
What it means
- Owners of dated single-tenant office: your exit may not be another office tenant. Before assuming a repositioning is too hard, have the bones read — width, corridor logic, window lines, egress, and parking often make residential conversion far more feasible than it looks.
- Developers and investors: mid-century suburban office near residential density and amenities can pencil as affordable or seniors’ housing, especially with the municipal–provincial–federal funding stack now available for these projects.
- The broker’s role: the real value is seeing a building’s highest and best use — sometimes a use it was never built for — and connecting it to the buyer able to deliver it.
Own an office building that’s harder to lease than it used to be? ONE. Commercial can assess its conversion potential and the buyers positioned to act on it — reach out and we’ll take a look.
Figures are third-party published research, supplemented by our internal data, and not derived from MLS® System data.
