Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
One company holds the ground in Sault Ste. Marie, and it says so in a filing: Algoma Steel's production facility sits on 686 hectares of land on the St. Mary's River, 'much of which is available for expansion', and the company calls itself the largest employer in the city - 2,400 full-time staff at the end of 2025, of whom 1,005 were given layoff notices effective March 2026. The other half of the story is a downtown mall: the shipping company that built Station Mall in 1973 and held it for five decades sold it for $30 million in 2022, took back an $18-million mortgage, was not repaid, and had the mall put into receivership in January 2025 - leaving the City of Sault Ste. Marie on the creditor list for $2.1 million of unpaid property taxes.
7 buildings · 6 with an owner established · 13 sources · 6 tier A · 1 tier C · prepared 2026-10-03
Ontario keeps the official record of who owns what, and sells it one parcel at a time. ServiceOntario states that land registry services are only available online and that the register covers more than 7.4 million parcels; anyone can look a parcel up through OnLand, but a copy of the parcel register costs $37.10 including HST under the fee schedule effective 2 November 2026. There is no bulk ownership extract and no open assessment roll - MPAC's values sit behind AboutMyProperty, propertyline and Municipal Connect, each requiring a login. Sault Ste. Marie is the one city in this batch where that barely matters, because the dominant owner is a public company: Algoma Steel Group Inc. files in Canada and the United States, and its filings state the hectarage, the employee count and the condition of each mill. The Station Mall ownership chain is public for a different reason - it was fought out in court, and the purchase price is on the registered transfer that local reporting read.
- realtor.ca — “Realtor.ca's terms of use forbid reproducing, redistributing or systematically retrieving its listing data; the site also returns 403 to scripts. Not scraped, and no listing data from it appears in this record.”
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Algoma Steel works 105 West Street, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario P6A 7B4 686 hectares (about 1,695 acres) |
Industrial | Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) The size comes from the company's own securities filing. Algoma's Form 20-F for the year ended 31 March 2022, Item 4.D: 'Our production facility is located on the St. Mary's River adjacent to other industrial facilities in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. It is on 686 hectares of land, much of which is available for expansion... we operate the only deep-water dock on the upper St. Mary's River, at Leigh's Bay.' The 2025 annual information form gives the principal office as 105 West Street and states: 'We are the largest employer in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. As of December 31, 2025, the Company had 2,400 full-time employees.' On 1 December 2025 it issued layoff notices to 1,005 of them. |
Public company | —A |
| Station Mall 293 Bay Street, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario over 473,000 sq ft of gross leasable area |
Retail | SM International Holdings Ltd. (in receivership since 22 January 2025) The fullest ownership chain in this batch, because it ended in court. Algoma Central Corporation (TSX: ALC) built the waterfront mall in the early 1970s as Algoma Central Railway and 'acted as the landlord for nearly half a century'; it announced in 2015 it would sell all its commercial real estate, and after Sears left as anchor in 2017 a buyer was hard to find. It closed the sale on 30 June 2022 to Markham-based SM International Holdings Ltd., incorporated 8 January that year. The buyer did not repay the $18-million mortgage by a court deadline of 16 January 2025; B. Riley Farber Inc. was appointed receiver on 22 January 2025, and CBRE has marketed the mall since May 2025. |
Private company | CAD $30 million 2022-06-30 $12 million cash plus an $18-million vendor take-back mortgage from Algoma Central at 5.5 per cent annual interest, read by SooToday from the documents filed with the provincial land registry office A |
| Algoma Steel electric arc furnace complex Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (adjacent to the existing steelmaking facility) |
Industrial | Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) What a company does with the spare half of a 686-hectare site. The 2025 AIF states the EAF steelmaking facility 'is being built on vacant land adjacent to our current steelmaking facility to mitigate disruption to current operations', integrating into existing downstream equipment to reduce capital expenditure. First steel from Unit One came in early July 2025 after arc testing of all nine Q-One transformer modules; the second EAF was expected complete in the first half of 2026. Blast Furnace No. 7 was decommissioned in January 2026 and No. 6 remains idled. Federal loan repayment begins on the earlier of full grid power or 1 January 2030. |
Public company | CAD up to C$200 million 2021-09-20 Federal SIF EAF Loan from the Minister of Industry via the Net Zero Accelerator, guaranteed by Algoma Steel Group Inc. - a loan toward the transformation, not a land price A |
| Direct Strip Production Complex (DSPC) Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (Algoma Steel works) 2.3 million tons of annualised capacity |
Industrial | Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) Algoma's 2025 AIF: the DSPC, 'constructed in 1995 at an approximate cost of C$450 million', integrates continuous casting and hot rolling for sheet steel, with current annualised production capacity of 2.3 million tons. The company states the coupled caster-and-hot-mill configuration gives it a cost advantage over traditional integrated hot rolling. Sheet steel was approximately 77 per cent of total shipment volumes for the twelve months to 31 December 2025. |
Public company | CAD approximately C$450 million 1995 construction cost as stated in Algoma Steel's 2025 annual information form; this is a build cost, not a transaction A |
| 166-inch discrete plate mill Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (Algoma Steel works) up to 700,000 tons a year |
Industrial | Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) The only discrete plate rolling mill in Canada, 166 inches wide, modernised in 2024 to support annual plate capacity of up to approximately 700,000 tons - 'enhanced rolling capability, dimensional tolerances, product quality and heat-treatment processing capability'. Plate products were 23 per cent of shipments in the twelve months to 31 December 2025, sold to fabricators and manufacturers in construction, energy, mining, transportation, industrial and defence. The company's cold mill facilities - pickling, hot rolled tempering, cold reduction rolling and annealing - were idled as of 31 December 2025. Algoma Steel's 2025 annual information form. |
Public company | —A |
| Algoma port facility and the Leigh's Bay deep-water dock St. Mary's River, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario nearly 450 vessels and more than 4.5 million tons of shipments a year |
Industrial | Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) The 2025 AIF describes 'Our adjacent port facility, the fourth largest Canadian port on the Great Lakes by volume', which 'has historically handled nearly 450 vessels per year and more than 4.5 million tons of shipments'. The 2022 20-F adds that Algoma's facilities include raw material and commercial docks and that it operates 'the only deep-water dock on the upper St. Mary's River, at Leigh's Bay'. Approximately 84 per cent of its customers are within a 500-mile radius. |
Public company | —A |
| Sault Area Hospital Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario |
Institutional | Not established the source would not open The hospital's own site loads but its /about-us path 404s and its readable content is navigation only; no bed count, no site area and no owning corporation statement could be read, and no filing or register entry was opened. Entered with an owner blank rather than assumed, because 'the hospital corporation owns the hospital' is an assumption and not a document. |
Not established | —C |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
This is the one city in the batch where the dominant holding is measured, because the holder is a reporting issuer in two countries. No MPAC assessed value is public, and the City of Sault Ste. Marie's budget pages render navigation only, so the municipal figure that does exist here comes from a receivership creditor list.
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.
686 hectares in one company's hands, and nothing else in the city with a published land area at all. That is not a failure of research - Ontario publishes no assessment roll and no bulk ownership file, and the only reason Algoma's figure exists is that a securities regulator required it. Everything else here is measured in square feet of mall, homes per year, or employees.
| Name | Type | Holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc., TSX/Nasdaq: ASTL) Stated in the company's own Form 20-F, Item 4.D, for the year ended 31 March 2022: the production facility is on 686 hectares on the St. Mary's River, 'much of which is available for expansion'. The company describes itself as the largest employer in the city. |
Public company | 686 hectares (about 1,695 acres)A |
| SM International Holdings Ltd. Owner of record since 30 June 2022 at a price of $30 million; in receivership since 22 January 2025 and being marketed by CBRE. No land area for the site is published in any source opened. |
Private company | Station Mall, 293 Bay Street - over 473,000 sq ftA |
| Algoma Central Properties Inc. A record of what the city used to look like: the railway that built the mall owned the biggest piece of downtown for half a century, decided in 2015 to exit commercial real estate entirely, and now holds a defaulted $18-million mortgage over it. |
Public company | former owner of Station Mall for nearly 50 years; now its mortgageeA |
| City of Sault Ste. Marie Not a holding - a claim. The city tops the list of 41 unsecured creditors in the Station Mall receivership, owed $2.1 million in property taxes on a list dated 31 January 2025. The municipality's own parcel holdings are not published and were not searched; its budget and financial-statement pages render navigation only to scripts. |
Government | $2.1 million owed to it in Station Mall property taxesA |
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.
Sixteen building licences sit at Sault Ste. Marie addresses in Ontario's Home Construction Regulatory Authority directory - the fewest of any city in this batch - and the largest has delivered 165 homes in eleven years. The volume leader, Sal-Dan Developments, has been licensed since 1981 and has never exceeded 25 possessions in a year. Several of the licences are named after the family and registered on a street named after the family. The notable entries are the two small builders with heavy claims: Daniel Fremlin Holdings Inc., sixteen possessions and $77,320.70 paid in claims across four chargeable conciliations, and David Maki Builders Limited, ten possessions and $304,000 in claims - the largest claims total per home anywhere in this batch.
| Name | Type | Possessions 2016-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Sal-Dan Developments Limited 432 Great Northern Road, Sault Ste. Marie; licensed 20 March 1981; all 165 freehold; no chargeable conciliations and no claims paid. By year: 22 (2016), 20 (2017), 14 (2018), 18 (2019), 10 (2020), 25 (2021), 24 (2022), 14 (2023), 9 (2024), 6 (2025), 3 to date 2026. HCRA Ontario Builder Directory API. |
Family / private | 165A |
| Ruscio Masonry and Construction Ltd. 1085 McNabb Street; licensed 31 January 1995; all freehold; no conciliations, no claims. Almost all of the volume is recent and lumpy: between 1 and 3 possessions a year from 2016 to 2022, then 29 in 2023 and 27 in 2024, then 1 in 2025. HCRA directory. |
Family / private | 75A |
| Ficmar Builders Inc. (Ficmar Construction Group) 1092 Great Northern Road; licensed 7 March 2007; 64 freehold and 2 condominium; no conciliations and no claims. Steady at 4 to 12 a year throughout. HCRA directory. |
Family / private | 66A |
| Mark Mageran Licensed 5 January 2009; all freehold; no conciliations and no claims. Included because it is the fourth-largest home-building licence in a city of about 73,000 people - which is the point about the scale of the Sault's new-build market. HCRA directory. |
Private company | 20A |
| Daniel Fremlin Holdings Inc. 1152 Third Line West; licensed 15 April 2021; all freehold; four chargeable conciliations and $77,320.70 paid in claims - roughly $4,800 per home delivered. HCRA directory. |
Private company | 16A |
| David Maki Builders Limited 123 Maki Road; the directory records an initial licence date of 10 July 2025 against ten possessions, one chargeable conciliation and $304,000 paid in claims - the heaviest claims total per home in this five-city batch. HCRA directory; no explanation of the claims is published in the directory. |
Family / private | 10A |
| Habitat for Humanity Sault Ste Marie & Area 066A - 44 Great Northern Road; licensed 19 March 2019; eight freehold possessions, no conciliations and no claims. A charity appearing in the top eight builders by volume is itself a measure of the market. HCRA directory. |
Institution | 8A |
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
The commercial property story in Sault Ste. Marie is a retreat and a receivership. The company that built and held the city's largest shopping centre for fifty years decided in 2015 to leave real estate altogether and is now its mortgagee rather than its landlord; the buyer that replaced it lost the property to a receiver inside three years; and the largest industrial estate in the city is owner-occupied by a steelmaker that is cutting 1,005 jobs. No REIT, pension fund or national landlord appears anywhere in the Sault record opened.
| Name | Type | Floor area / land |
|---|---|---|
| Algoma Steel Inc. (Algoma Steel Group Inc.) Owner-occupier of the dominant industrial estate: coke ovens, blast furnaces (No. 7 decommissioned January 2026, No. 6 idled), two EAF units, the DSPC hot mill, Canada's only discrete plate mill, idled cold mill facilities, raw material and commercial docks and the only deep-water dock on the upper St. Mary's River. 2,400 full-time employees at 31 December 2025. |
Public company | 686 hectaresA |
| SM International Holdings Ltd. Markham-based, incorporated 8 January 2022, bought Station Mall for $30 million on 30 June 2022 and lost control of it to a court-appointed receiver on 22 January 2025. In its responding court filings the company said no receiver was needed, claiming it had increased tenant numbers and spent nearly $5 million on roof repairs, a new HVAC system and updated closed-circuit cameras; its president's affidavit said he had arranged 'family money' from China to cover the loan. The owner of record is still the company; control is with B. Riley Farber Inc. |
Private company | over 473,000 sq ft (Station Mall), about 45 per cent occupiedA |
| Algoma Central Properties Inc. (Algoma Central Corporation, TSX: ALC) Algoma Central built the mall in the early 1970s as Algoma Central Railway and was its landlord for nearly half a century; it announced in 2015 that it would sell all of its commercial real estate, and is now based in St. Catharines with its business in Great Lakes shipping. Its subsidiary Algoma Central Properties Inc. holds the $18-million vendor take-back mortgage, launched the court action and is the only secured creditor. The company's own site now describes it purely as a marine company, established 1899. |
Public company | lone secured creditor on Station Mall; vendor and former owner of 50 yearsA |
| CBRE Limited (as marketing agent) and B. Riley Farber Inc. (as receiver) Not owners, and recorded as such: B. Riley Farber Inc., an international business advisory firm, was appointed receiver on 22 January 2025; CBRE was chosen as property manager, awarded the sale listing in April 2025 and began marketing in mid-May 2025 on behalf of Algoma Central Properties through the receiver. CBRE is itself an unsecured creditor, owed $391,456.97. |
Private company | control of Station Mall since January 2025A |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- Whether the 686-hectare figure still describes Algoma Steel's holding. It is stated in the 2022 Form 20-F; the 2023-2026 40-F filings and their annual information forms contain no property section and no acreage, and part of that land has since been built on for the EAF.
- Whether Station Mall has been sold out of receivership. The last document opened is from May 2025, when CBRE began marketing it; no later filing, court endorsement or sale report was opened, so the record leaves SM International Holdings Ltd. as owner of record with the receivership noted.
- The site area of Station Mall. None of the three articles opened states one.
- Sault Area Hospital: the owning corporation, its site area and its bed count. The hospital's own about page 404s to scripts.
- Algoma University and the Shingwauk site. The university's About page renders navigation only, so no holding is recorded.
- Tenaris Algoma Tubes, Heliene, the Sault Ste. Marie Canal and the OLG head office in the city - all plausible major occupiers, none opened, none recorded.
- Any assessed value, highest-assessed parcel or assessment base for Sault Ste. Marie, and any municipal levy figure. MPAC publishes none of it openly and the city's finance pages are not readable by fetch.
- Any link between a property holding and elected office in Sault Ste. Marie. Nothing was established; the city appears in this record only as a creditor in the Station Mall receivership.
Sources
- Land Registry - overview — Government of Ontario (ServiceOntario) · openA
- Bulletin No. 2026-04: Land Services Fee Changes effective November 2, 2026 (Schedules I-III) — Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement, ServiceOntario, Land Registry Services Branch · openA
- MPAC home page (AboutMyProperty, propertyline, Municipal Connect logins) — Municipal Property Assessment Corporation · registrationA
- Algoma Steel Group Inc. Annual Information Form for the twelve months ended December 31, 2025 (Exhibit 99.1 to Form 40-F) — Algoma Steel Group Inc. / SEC EDGAR · openA
- Algoma Steel Group Inc. Form 20-F for the year ended March 31, 2022, Item 4.D Property, Plants and Equipment (686 hectares) — Algoma Steel Group Inc. / SEC EDGAR · openA
- Station Mall joins list of Ontario shopping centres on the sale block — Real Estate News Exchange (RENX) · openA
- EXCLUSIVE: Station Mall in receivership after owner fails to pay $18M mortgage — SooToday (Village Media) · openA
- Station Mall's future uncertain as property heads back on the market — SooToday (Village Media) · openA
- Sault Ste. Marie downtown mall has been sold for $30 million (purchase price and mortgage read from land registry documents) — Northern Ontario Business / SooToday · openA
- Ontario Builder Directory (builders, buildersummary and builderProperties API endpoints) — Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) · openA
- Algoma Central Corporation home page (marine company established 1899) — Algoma Central Corporation · openA
- Algoma Steel Group Inc. - SEC filing history (CIK 0001860805) — SEC EDGAR · openA
- Sault Area Hospital - home page (about-us path 404) — Sault Area Hospital · openC