Burlington, Ontario
One family has shaped Burlington's map more than any institution: Alinea Group Holdings, the former Paletta Group, calls itself the largest private-sector land owner in the Burlington area and holds the 122-acre King Road assembly, the 252-acre Eagle Heights lands and Bronte Creek Meadows - which it describes as the largest parcel of vacant land inside the city's urban boundary, and which it is still farming - while the two enclosed malls that carry the city's retail are held by outsiders, RioCan at Burlington Centre and Ivanhoe Cambridge, now operating as La Caisse, at Mapleview.
8 buildings · 6 with an owner established · 14 sources · 3 tier B · 5 tier A · prepared 2026-10-03
Ontario's land registry is the official record of ownership: ServiceOntario states it "contains the official records of property ownership and other legal interests such as mortgages, transfers and leases" across "more than 7.4 million parcels", that the services "are only available online", and that on OnLand "You can do a self-search for a fee". That fee is $37.10 for a copy of a parcel register, the page that names the registered owner, under the bulletin effective 2 November 2026. There is no bulk ownership extract at any price and no open assessment roll - MPAC's values are login-only and still fixed at 1 January 2016 for the 2026 tax year - and Ontario publishes no price-paid dataset. In Burlington that bites hardest on the land: a single company's holdings run to hundreds of acres across the rural north and the Aldershot corridor, and the only public account of their extent is the company's own.
The marquee buildings
The towers that set the tone of the core, and who holds them. A price is the price a document states, on the date it states — not an estimate of what the building is worth now.
| Building | Use | Owner | Owner type | Last price paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burlington Centre 777 Guelph Line 721,000 sq ft · 2 floors |
Retail | RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust The mall's own website carries the statement "Owned and Managed by RIOCAN" in its masthead. Opened in October 1968 as Burlington Mall, developed by Cambridge Leaseholds, 721,000 sq ft, 132 stores, two floors, 4,623 parking spaces; the Hudson's Bay anchor closed on 9 February 2025, leaving an empty anchor. Wikipedia's body text says the mall "is owned by RioCan Management Inc." and was owned until mid-2011 by Ivanhoe Cambridge, while its own infobox gives the owner as Primaris REIT - a contradiction the record does not resolve; the owner entered here is the one the property itself publishes. |
REIT | —B |
| Mapleview Centre 900 Maple Avenue 635,531 sq ft · 2 floors |
Retail | Ivanhoe Cambridge (now operating as La Caisse) and Canapen (Halton) Ltd. Opened September 1990, 635,531 sq ft, 180 stores, 2,861 parking spaces. The ownership entered here rests on Wikipedia's infobox, whose floor-area and ownership citation is an archived Ivanhoe Cambridge property page; Ivanhoe Cambridge's own site now says only that "Ivanhoe Cambridge, its real estate portfolio, now operates as La Caisse" and publishes no per-property page that could be opened, and the mall's own website states it is "Property managed by JLL". The Hudson's Bay anchor is closed and a second anchor space, last Sears, was split between Decathlon, Sporting Life and Linen Chest. No current owner-side page confirms the holding, so this is tier B, not A. |
Pension fund | —B |
| Bronte Creek Meadows opposite Bronte Creek Provincial Park, Burlington |
Land | Alinea Group Holdings Inc. Alinea's own description, as reported in a named interview with its president: Bronte Creek Meadows "is located across the street from Bronte Creek Provincial Park and is the largest parcel of vacant land within the urban boundary of Burlington. While it's currently being farmed, it has development potential as a future mixed-use community." No acreage is stated for this parcel in any source opened, and no price. The company was The Paletta Group of Companies until the rename; its president is Paul Paletta, who with his brother Michael assumed ownership after the 2019 death of founder Pasquale (Pat) Paletta. |
Family / private | —A |
| 1200 King Road 1200 King Road, Aldershot 122 acres |
Land | Alinea Group Holdings Inc. Alinea is master-planning "a 122-acre sustainable mixed-use community at 1200 King Rd. in Burlington, a short walk east of the Aldershot GO Transit / VIA Rail station", to include residential, educational, employment and commercial space with nature trails. Reported from an interview with Alinea's president; no purchase price or acquisition date appears in any source opened. |
Family / private | —A |
| Eagle Heights near Aldershot GO/VIA station, Burlington 252 acres |
Land | Alinea Group Holdings Inc. "Eagle Heights, located near the Aldershot GO Transit/VIA Rail station in Burlington, will feature more than 900 single-family homes and townhomes. Almost one-third of the 252-acre site will remain undeveloped and preserved in a natural forested state." Stated by the company to RENX. Together with 1200 King Road this makes Alinea the controlling landowner of the Aldershot growth corridor. |
Family / private | —A |
| Appleby Line retail plaza east side of Appleby Line, south of Highway 407 63,000 sq ft |
Retail | Alinea Group Holdings Inc. "Alinea owns a 63,000-square-foot retail plaza on the east side of Appleby Line just south of Highway 407 in Burlington where it plans to add more buildings." The company says it holds more than one million square feet of existing tenanted commercial and retail development in total, but the Appleby Line plaza is the only Burlington building for which a floor area is stated. |
Family / private | —A |
| Paradigm Fairview Street at Brant Street area, Burlington |
Residential | Not established a paid title search would answer it Burlington's largest condominium delivery of the decade by a single licensed company: Fairview Joint Venture Inc., licensed at 761 Brant Street under the HCRA umbrella "The Molinaro Group" since 13 February 2014, records 559 condominium possessions and no freehold. As a registered condominium the building has no single owner - each unit is a separate parcel at $37.10 a search - so ownership is left blank rather than attributed to the developer. |
Not established | —A |
| Nautique Lakefront Residences 374 Martha Street |
Residential | Not established a paid title search would answer it Downtown Burlington's lakefront condominium, built by the Adi Development Group, whose licensee Adi Construction Management Inc. at 1100 Burloak Drive records 755 condominium possessions and no freehold since January 2020 - the largest condominium count of any Burlington-licensed company. Entered without an owner: the building is a registered condominium, and the developer is not the owner of the finished units. |
Not established | —B |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
Burlington's tax base is the clearest statistical trace of the Paletta/Alinea landbank: the city's farmland assessment is $169.8 million, five times Kitchener's and five and a half times Oakville's, in a city whose urban area stops at the Parkway Belt and whose north is agricultural. All figures are from the city's own Financial Information Return to the province for 2025, published as bulk CSV under the Open Government Licence - Ontario; the underlying values are 1 January 2016 current values, which MPAC confirms are still the basis for 2026 taxes.
Who owns the town
At this scale the significant owner is rarely a trust or a fund: it is one or two local holding companies, a family in its second or third generation, and often the land around the town rather than the buildings in it.
This is the whole point of the Burlington record. The city's urban area stops at the Parkway Belt and Highway 407, and the land beyond it - and the two big undeveloped assemblies inside the boundary - are concentrated in one family company that has been buying since 1964 and says so plainly. Everything else named below is a counterparty or a builder, not a holder of comparable land.
| Name | Type | Holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Alinea Group Holdings Inc. / Alinea Land Corporation Named Burlington holdings, from the company's own statements: Bronte Creek Meadows, which Alinea describes as the largest parcel of vacant land within the city's urban boundary and is currently farming; a 122-acre mixed-use master plan at 1200 King Road beside Aldershot GO; the 252-acre Eagle Heights lands, over 900 homes planned with a third left forested; and a 63,000 sq ft retail plaza on Appleby Line south of Highway 407. Its wider activity is in Hamilton - the 405-acre Watertown Bay, 138-acre Ancaster Meadows, 64-acre Stoney Creek on the Ridge and the Rymal Industrial Centre. Founded in 1951; the Burlington landholding dates from 1964. |
Family / private | self-described largest private-sector land owner in the Burlington areaA |
| RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust The largest institutional holding in the city and, with the Hudson's Bay anchor dark since February 2025, the largest redevelopment site in central Burlington. RioCan says it is involved with roughly 20.6 million sq ft of land already zoned for new development across its portfolio but does not plan to move on it within two years. |
REIT | Burlington Centre, 721,000 sq ft on 4,623 parking spacesB |
| Nelson Aggregate Co. / the Mount Nemo escarpment lands Recorded as a gap rather than a holding. Burlington's other large private landholding is quarry land on the Niagara Escarpment; Wikipedia records a decommissioned quarry at Kerncliff Park on the city's boundary with Waterdown, now naturalised. No document naming the owner of the active or former Burlington quarry lands was opened, so no owner and no acreage is entered. |
Private company | not establishedC |
Who builds the houses
New-home building in this market: the volume, and the firms behind it. Ownership of a builder matters as much as its volume — a private-equity platform and a family firm behave differently.
Burlington is a builders' head-office town out of proportion to its size: 138 companies hold a current HCRA licence at a Burlington address, more than twice as many as Kitchener, because the Golden Horseshoe's mid-size builders are headquartered here and build elsewhere. The figures below are each group's total possessions 2016-2026 across all of its licensed companies, from the Ontario Builder Directory's own API - so they are province-wide output by Burlington-based firms, not homes built in Burlington, and the directory does not break them down by municipality. Note how much of it is condominium: Adi, Molinaro and Carriage Gate between them record almost no freehold.
| Name | Type | Possessions 2016-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| LIV Communities Umbrella group licensed at 1005 Skyview Drive, Burlington. The largest single licensee is LH Investments Inc. and Westland Developments, licensed 27 August 2019, with 1,582 freehold and 480 condominium possessions (2,062); LIV (Hardy Road) Inc. adds 295 freehold. The most freehold-weighted of the big Burlington groups. |
Private company | 2,595 across six licencesA |
| Adi Development Group Licensed at 1100 Burloak Drive and 4853 Thomas Alton Boulevard, Burlington. Adi Construction Management Inc. 755 condominium possessions, 4880 Valera Road Inc. 414 (70 freehold, 344 condominium), Adi Morgan Developments (Thomas Alton) 330 condominium, Adi Morgan Developments (Lakeshore) 208 condominium. Almost entirely high-rise. |
Private company | 1,707 across five licencesA |
| Branthaven Homes Licensed at 720 Oval Court, Burlington, the oldest licence dating to 1991. Sixteen companies, one per project: BC Trafalgar Inc. 618 condominium possessions and a second BC Trafalgar limited partnership 221, plus licensed vehicles for Fourth Line, Ninth Line, Mount Hope and the LV blocks. |
Private company | 1,221 across sixteen licencesA |
| New Horizon Homes Licensed at 3170 Harvester Road, Burlington. Almost all of it is one company: NHDG (Waterdown) Inc., licensed 11 July 2018, with 937 condominium and 82 freehold possessions. |
Private company | 1,094 across eight licencesA |
| The Molinaro Group Licensed at 761 Brant Street, Burlington. Fairview Joint Venture Inc., licensed 13 February 2014, carries 559 condominium possessions and no freehold. The group has built the downtown Burlington high-rise skyline; its recorded output is entirely condominium. |
Family / private | 716 across four licencesA |
| Carriage Gate Homes Licensed at 421 Brant Street, Burlington. Lakeshore (Burlington) Inc., licensed 20 August 2021, records 252 condominium possessions. Like Molinaro, a downtown-core high-rise builder rather than a subdivision builder. |
Private company | 610 across five licencesA |
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
Burlington's commercial stock splits three ways: two enclosed malls held by out-of-town institutions, a large private landbank company that has been converting land into tenanted industrial and retail for sixty years, and a cluster of downtown condominium developers who are builders rather than landlords. The malls are the assessed value; Alinea is the land.
| Name | Type | Floor area / land |
|---|---|---|
| Alinea Group Holdings Inc. (formerly The Paletta Group of Companies) "Alinea calls itself the largest private-sector land owner in the Burlington area, with more than one million square feet of existing tenanted commercial and retail development and a large inventory of future development sites." Its president told RENX the company "has largely operated as a land bank, strategically building out commercial and industrial properties and occasionally partnering with large homebuilders to develop residential subdivisions". Alinea Land Corporation's own site gives its address as 4480 Paletta Court, Burlington, and dates the family's Burlington landholding to 1964, when Pat Paletta "began purchasing land for his cattle feeding operations". |
Family / private | more than 1 million sq ft tenanted, plus 122 + 252 acres and Bronte Creek MeadowsA |
| RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust Burlington Centre's own website states it is "Owned and Managed by RIOCAN". RioCan reported owning 178 properties with about 32 million sq ft of net leasable area at 30 June 2026 and said on its Q2 call that it was exiting five of the twelve properties it held as a partner with Hudson's Bay Company; Burlington Centre was not among the HBC-partnered properties named. |
REIT | 721,000 sq ft (Burlington Centre)B |
| Ivanhoe Cambridge / La Caisse Ivanhoe Cambridge's own site states that "Ivanhoe Cambridge, its real estate portfolio, now operates as La Caisse" and points to La Caisse's real-estate page; it publishes no property list that could be opened, and Mapleview's own site says the property is managed by JLL. The 635,531 sq ft figure and the co-ownership with Canapen (Halton) Ltd. come from Wikipedia's infobox citing an archived Ivanhoe Cambridge page. |
Pension fund | 635,531 sq ft (Mapleview Centre, with Canapen (Halton) Ltd.)B |
| The Molinaro Group Entered as a builder-landlord rather than an established landlord: the HCRA directory records Fairview Joint Venture Inc. at 761 Brant Street with 559 condominium possessions, but no document opened establishes Molinaro as the registered owner of any standing commercial building. |
Family / private | 559 condominium units delivered by its largest licenseeA |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- The acreage of Bronte Creek Meadows. Alinea states it is the largest vacant parcel inside Burlington's urban boundary but gives no figure, and no planning document stating one was opened.
- Whether Mapleview Centre is still held by Ivanhoe Cambridge. The entity now operates as La Caisse and publishes no property list; the mall's own site names JLL as manager, not an owner. A search for a sale found none, but the absence of a reported sale is not a confirmation of ownership. Treat the Mapleview owner as tier B.
- Burlington Centre's owner of record. The property's own masthead says RioCan; Wikipedia's body text says RioCan Management Inc. and its infobox says Primaris REIT. Primaris publishes a portfolio page that renders client-side and could not be read. No filing from either trust was opened.
- What the City of Burlington owns - city hall, the Burlington Performing Arts Centre (opened 2011, 718-seat main stage), the LaSalle Park marina with its 215 slips. No municipal page stating ownership of a specific parcel could be opened, so no municipal holding is entered.
- Who owns the Burlington quarry lands on the Niagara Escarpment, and the acreage. Not established; nothing is claimed.
- Any link between a property holding and elected office in Burlington: nothing was established and the record carries none. Checked: every source opened for this record. Note that Alinea's principals are named here only because the company's own statements and named reporting identify them as its owners, per the naming rule.
- Assessed value of any individual Burlington parcel. MPAC's per-property values are login-only and frozen at 1 January 2016 for the 2026 tax year.
Sources
- Overview: land registry — Government of Ontario (ServiceOntario) · openA
- Bulletin 2026-04: Land Services Fee Changes effective November 2, 2026 — Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement, ServiceOntario, Land Registry Services Branch · openA
- The Assessment Cycle — Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) · openA
- Financial Information Return (FIR) multi-year CSV data, fir_data_2025.csv and fir_data_2024.csv (Schedule 22, Taxation and Payments-in-Lieu Summary) — Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing · openA
- Ontario Builder Directory (/api/builders, /api/buildersummary, /api/builderProperties) — Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) · openA
- Burlington Centre - official site (masthead: "Owned and Managed by RIOCAN") — RioCan / Burlington Centre · openA
- Mapleview Centre — Wikipedia · openA
- New name, vision and mission for Alinea Group Holdings — Real Estate News Exchange (RENX) · openA
- Burlington, Ontario — Wikipedia · openA
- Sixty Years in Burlington / Alinea Land Corporation — Alinea Land Corporation · openA
- Burlington Centre — Wikipedia · openA
- Mapleview Centre - official site (footer: "Property managed by JLL", 900 Maple Ave) — Mapleview Centre / JLL · openA
- Ivanhoe Cambridge home page ("its real estate portfolio, now operates as La Caisse") — Ivanhoe Cambridge / La Caisse · openA
- RioCan exits 5 HBC properties, focuses on 'strong' retail operations — Real Estate News Exchange (RENX) · openA