Whitby, Ontario
Whitby is a $27.0 billion tax base that is 90 per cent residential, and its commercial ownership is unusually legible for a town its size: SmartCentres REIT publishes 479,000 square feet across three Whitby centres and states its interest in each as 100 per cent, First Capital REIT publishes Whitby Mall and Thickson Place across Thickson Road from one another, and the largest single parcel on any register is a 257.9-hectare Lake Ontario water lot held by Fisheries and Oceans Canada - while the homes are built by Greater Toronto companies whose Whitby project subsidiaries are licensed in Toronto, not in Whitby.
8 buildings · 6 with an owner established · 15 sources · 7 tier A · 1 tier B · prepared 2026-10-03
Ontario's land registry is the official record of who owns what: ServiceOntario states it "contains the official records of property ownership and other legal interests such as mortgages, transfers and leases" and that it "covers more than 7.4 million parcels of land in the province". It is public but not open - the same page says the services "are only available online" and that on OnLand "You can do a self-search for a fee", and the fee bulletin effective 2 November 2026 prices a copy of a parcel register, the document that names the registered owner, at $37.10 per PIN. There is no bulk ownership extract at any price, and MPAC's per-property values are login-only and still pegged to fully phased-in 1 January 2016 current values for the 2026 tax year. Ontario publishes no price-paid file. Whitby is the one city in this batch where the retail owners can be stated exactly without touching the register, because two REITs publish property-by-property pages that give the address, the floor area and the ownership percentage. Everything else - who owns the Ball Corporation can plant, who owns the industrial buildings in the 401 corridor, whether the Ontario Shores hospital campus is titled to the Crown or to the hospital corporation - would cost $37.10 a parcel to settle, and none of it is settled here.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whitby Mall 1615 Dundas Street East 394,000+ sq ft (376,800+ sq ft of leasable area quoted on the same page) · 4 floors |
Mixed use | First Capital Real Estate Investment Trust First Capital's own property page calls it "our vibrant enclosed shopping centre, Whitby Mall", "Spanning over 394,000 sf", a mixed-use centre "grocery-anchored" with "retail on the main level and offices above" - the site plan it publishes covers second, third and fourth floors of a west office tower. The page's headline figure is 376,800+ sf. It also says the centre is "Ideally situated adjacent to our Thickson Place centre", which establishes common ownership of both sides of Thickson Road. No acquisition date or price appears on the page. |
REIT | —A |
| SmartCentres Whitby North 4100 Baldwin Street South 356,000 sq ft · 1 floors |
Retail | SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust 100% SmartCentres' property page states the address, "SQUARE FEET 356,000" and "OWNERSHIP 100%" - the trust's own disclosure of its interest, which is what makes this a stated fact rather than an inference. Described as a Walmart-anchored centre at Taunton Road East and Baldwin Street South, home to the LCBO, Bulk Barn, Scotiabank and Tim Hortons and adjacent to a Real Canadian Superstore. The largest of the three SmartCentres assets in the town. No price or acquisition date is published. |
REIT | —A |
| SmartCentres Whitby Shores 619 Victoria Street West 85,000 sq ft · 1 floors |
Retail | SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust 100% "SQUARE FEET 85,000", "OWNERSHIP 100%" on SmartCentres' own page. At Victoria Street West and Gordon Street, minutes south of Highway 401 and the Whitby GO station, with Metro, LCBO, Pet Valu and Tim Hortons as named tenants. No price is stated. |
REIT | —A |
| SmartCentres Whitby Northeast 30 Taunton Road East 38,000 sq ft · 1 floors |
Retail | SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust 100% "SQUARE FEET 38,000", "OWNERSHIP 100%" on the trust's own page; at Baldwin Street South and Taunton Road East, with a Boston Pizza, an RBC and a Swiss Chalet. The smallest of SmartCentres' three Whitby holdings, and the reason the trust's Whitby total comes to 479,000 sq ft rather than 356,000. |
REIT | —A |
| Thickson Place 80 Thickson Road South 99,700 sq ft (104,800+ sq ft quoted on the same page) · 1 floors |
Retail | First Capital Real Estate Investment Trust First Capital's page describes "a 99,700 square foot open-air shopping centre located east of Toronto in Whitby", "situated across from Whitby Mall along Thickson Road", with the headline figure given as 104,800+ sf. Published by the owner, so ownership is stated rather than inferred; no acquisition price or date appears. |
REIT | —A |
| Whitby Small Craft Harbour Lake Ontario, opposite lots 25-28, Broken Front Concession 257.8970 ha |
Land | Fisheries and Oceans Canada Directory of Federal Real Property property 27530: Crown Owned, custodian Fisheries and Oceans Canada, primary use Transportation Marine, 257.8970 hectares, no buildings and no floor area. By land area this is the largest single title on any register that covers Whitby, but it is a water lot in Lake Ontario rather than ground, so it is not expressed here as a share of the town's 146.53 square kilometres. The department holds a second Whitby parcel of 5.1030 hectares recorded as "Whitby (Whitby Yacht Club)", also Crown Owned. |
Government | —A |
| Ball Corporation beverage can plant Whitby, Ontario (the filing names the town, not a street address) |
Industrial | Not established a paid title search would answer it Ball's 10-K lists "Whitby, Ontario, Canada" among its beverage packaging locations for North and Central America - the only Whitby industrial plant named in any SEC filing found. But the same Item 2 says only that "Ball's manufacturing locations, which are owned or leased by the company, are set forth below", without marking which is which, so the filing establishes the occupier and not the owner. Unlike Cabot's table, which states outright that unmarked properties are owned, Ball's gives no legend. The owner is therefore blank, at $37.10 a parcel to settle. |
Not established | —A |
| Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences 700 Gordon Street approximately 640 acres as purchased in 1912 |
Institutional | Not established a paid title search would answer it Ontario Shores describes itself as "a public teaching hospital". Its own centenary timeline records the origin of the land: "1912 - The Ontario government purchased the land on the shores of Lake Ontario in Whitby for $128,000. Consisting of approximately 640 acres of land, the site for the proposed hospital was made up of a number of small farms and a larger property known as Bayside Farm." Whether title now rests with the provincial Crown or with the hospital corporation - it became an independent public hospital rather than a provincial psychiatric facility - is not stated on anything opened, so the owner is left blank. |
Not established | —B |
The core land
The most valuable ground in the city, and what the public record says about it.
Whitby did not appear in the province's 2025 Financial Information Return file at the time of writing, so the figures below are the 2024 return, filed under s.294(1) of the Municipal Act and published as bulk CSV under the Open Government Licence - Ontario (Whitby's record last updated 10 March 2026). MPAC's per-property values remain login-only and fixed at fully phased-in 1 January 2016 current values for the 2026 tax year. The return describes a commuter town: 90.4 per cent of the base is residential, the office-building class is $19.1 million for the whole town, and Durham Region levies half again what Whitby itself does.
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.
Measured by stated land area, the largest title covering Whitby is federal and under water: 257.9 hectares of Lake Ontario held by Fisheries and Oceans Canada as the Whitby Small Craft Harbour, plus 5.1 hectares at the yacht club. On dry land, the only large holding any opened document fixes is the Ontario Shores hospital campus, whose 1912 purchase of about 640 acres the hospital itself records; who holds title to it now is not established. The retail REITs are large owners of buildings rather than of land.
| Name | Type | Holdings |
|---|---|---|
| Fisheries and Oceans Canada Whitby Small Craft Harbour, 257.8970 ha, described in the register as "Lake Ontario, opposite lots 25-28, BFC", plus "Whitby (Whitby Yacht Club)" at 5.1030 ha; both Crown Owned, both with no buildings. Both are recorded under the Oshawa metro area, which is why a metro-only match would miss them for Whitby. |
Government | 262.9999 ha across two Crown-owned parcelsA |
| SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust The largest private holding in the town that can be stated from a published source. The trust's pages give the ownership percentage for each centre, which is more than most Canadian landlords publish; they give no land area, so nothing is claimed about acreage. |
REIT | 479,000 sq ft of retail, 100% ownedA |
| First Capital Real Estate Investment Trust Two adjoining centres at Dundas Street East and Thickson Road, one enclosed and mixed-use with four floors, one open-air. First Capital's head office is 85 Hanna Ave, Suite 400, Toronto. No land area is published for either site. |
REIT | Whitby Mall and Thickson Place, about 494,000 sq ftA |
| Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences (or the provincial Crown) Entered with the ambiguity stated rather than resolved. The hospital's own timeline records that the Ontario government bought about 640 acres on the Whitby lakeshore in 1912 for $128,000, assembled from small farms and Bayside Farm, and the hospital describes itself today as "a public teaching hospital". No opened document says whether title passed to the hospital corporation or remains with the province, and no current acreage is published. |
Institution | approximately 640 acres as purchased in 1912B |
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.
The Ontario Builder Directory is misleading if you read it by address in Whitby: only 15 licensees carry a Whitby address and the largest has 61 possessions. The town is actually built by Greater Toronto companies through project subsidiaries named for Whitby and licensed in Toronto, Vaughan, Concord and Thornhill, and those carry the volume - more than 2,500 possessions between them. Both readings are given below. The caveat is doubled here: the directory records the licensee's registered address, not where the homes were built, and a company's name is its parent's project naming, not a legal statement of location.
| Name | Type | Possessions 2016-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Mattamy Homes (Mattamy (Whitby) Limited) Registered at 66 Wellington Street West, Toronto, under the HCRA umbrella "Mattamy Homes"; licensed 23 January 2017, status now Expired. 736 freehold possessions, no condominium, no claims paid. The largest single Whitby-named licensee in the directory, and invisible in an address-only reading. Mattamy's 146 licence records together account for 32,778 possessions province-wide, which is the scale a Whitby-only count cannot show. |
Private company | 736A |
| Heathwood Homes (Whitby) Limited 245 Yorkland Boulevard, Toronto, under the umbrella "Heron Group Of Companies"; licensed and current. 444 freehold possessions, no condominium, no claims. The second-largest Whitby-named licensee. |
Private company | 444A |
| Andrin Group (Andrin Whitby Country Lane Limited and Block Andrin Whitby Limited Partnership) Both at 26 Lesmill Road, Toronto, under the umbrella "Andrin Group": Andrin Whitby Country Lane Limited, Licensed, 321 freehold possessions; Block Andrin Whitby Limited Partnership, Expired, 103 freehold. The one-company-per-phase pattern again. |
Private company | 424 across two licencesA |
| Paradise Homes (Paradise Homes Whitby Inc. and Paradise Developments Whitby (Homes) Inc.) Both at 1 Herons Hill Way, Toronto, under the umbrella "Paradise Homes": 298 freehold possessions in the first company and 33 condominium in the second, both currently Licensed. |
Private company | 331 across two licencesA |
| DeNoble Homes (784534 Ontario Inc. and The Inverlynn Estate Ltd.) The largest builder group actually licensed at a Whitby address: both companies sit at 1300 Giffard St, Whitby, under the umbrella "DeNoble Homes". 784534 Ontario Inc., licensed 23 October 1992, has 61 freehold possessions and two chargeable conciliations with no claims paid; The Inverlynn Estate Ltd., licensed 29 June 2021, has 2 condominium possessions - a heritage-estate condominium project on the same site. |
Family / private | 63 across two licencesA |
| Fernhill Homes (974660 Ontario Inc.) 581 Columbus Road East, Whitby, under the umbrella "Fernhill Homes"; licensed 31 October 2013. 59 freehold possessions, no conciliations, no claims - the second-largest Whitby-addressed licensee and the only one in the north of the town, in Brooklin's growth area. |
Private company | 59A |
| Highmark Homes (Whitby (Brock and Rossland) Developments Inc.) 9000 Keele Street, Concord, under the umbrella "Highmark Homes"; Licensed. 60 freehold and 157 condominium possessions - the most mixed output of any Whitby-named licensee, and the clearest sign of mid-rise appearing at a Whitby intersection rather than in a subdivision. |
Private company | 217A |
| Opus Homes, Arista Homes and Deco Homes (the Whitby Meadows companies) Three separate groups each ran a licensee named for the same subdivision: OH (Whitby Meadows) Inc., Vaughan, 142 freehold, Licensed; Arista Homes (Whitby Meadows) Inc., Vaughan, 96 freehold, Expired; Deco Homes (Whitby Meadows) Inc., Vaughan, 91 freehold, Expired. A single Whitby land assembly built out by three builders in parallel is what the directory is actually showing. |
Private company | 329 across three licencesA |
Commercial landlords
The commercial side, counted separately from housing: who holds the office, retail and industrial floor area.
Whitby's commercial ownership is genuinely establishable, which is rare at this size: two REITs publish per-property pages giving address, floor area and - in SmartCentres' case - the ownership percentage, and between them they account for more than a million square feet. There is no office landlord of any scale, consistent with an office-building class assessed at $19.1 million for the whole town. Nobody files a Whitby industrial property table.
| Name | Type | Floor area |
|---|---|---|
| SmartCentres Real Estate Investment Trust From the trust's own property pages: Whitby North, 4100 Baldwin Street South, 356,000 sq ft, OWNERSHIP 100%; Whitby Shores, 619 Victoria Street West, 85,000 sq ft, 100%; Whitby Northeast, 30 Taunton Road East, 38,000 sq ft, 100%. Walmart anchors the largest. The trust's head office is 3200 Highway 7, Vaughan. No price or acquisition date is given for any of the three. |
REIT | 479,000 sq ft across three centres, each 100%A |
| First Capital Real Estate Investment Trust Whitby Mall at 1615 Dundas Street East, over 394,000 sf on First Capital's own description, and Thickson Place at 80 Thickson Road South, 99,700 sq ft. The pages are explicit that both are First Capital's ("our vibrant enclosed shopping centre", "adjacent to our Thickson Place centre"), which makes the trust the owner of both sides of Thickson Road at Dundas. Whitby Mall is mixed-use, with offices on the second, third and fourth floors above the retail. |
REIT | about 494,000 sq ft across two adjoining centresA |
| Ball Corporation Recorded because it is the only Whitby industrial occupier named in an SEC filing. Ball's Item 2 lists Whitby, Ontario among its North and Central America beverage packaging locations and says the locations are "owned or leased by the company" without saying which - so the plant is placed here as an occupier, not an owner. |
Public company | one beverage can plant; ownership not distinguished in the filingA |
| Unnamed landlord of Canada Post The only federal lease in Whitby. In the Directory of Federal Real Property, Canada Post's "Post Office Whitby" at 209 Dundas St E is Interest Type Lease or Licence, 250 square metres, while the Brooklin Post Office at 2 Price St is Crown Owned, 537 square metres. The register names the custodian and the interest, never the landlord. |
Private company | 250 sq m at 209 Dundas St EA |
Looked for and not found
Claims this page would have made if a source could be opened. They are left out rather than guessed.
- Who owns the Ball Corporation can plant in Whitby. The 10-K names the location but says only that Ball's plants are "owned or leased", with no legend distinguishing them.
- Who holds title to the Ontario Shores campus at 700 Gordon Street today. The 1912 provincial purchase of about 640 acres for $128,000 is documented by the hospital itself; the present registered owner is not.
- The current area of the Ontario Shores campus, and whether any of the 1912 acreage has been sold. Neither the hospital nor any provincial page opened states it.
- Who owns Whitby's $238.6 million industrial class and the 401-corridor buildings in it. No REIT or corporate filing publishes a Whitby industrial property table, and MPAC publishes nothing per parcel.
- What the Town of Whitby itself owns - Iroquois Park, the municipal building, the 1855 Whitby innovation site. No municipal document naming the town as registered owner of a specific parcel could be opened.
- Whether the Regional Municipality of Durham owns its headquarters in Whitby. Nothing opened states it, so no entry is made.
- Any link between a property holding and elected office in Whitby: nothing was established, and the record carries none.
Sources
- Overview: land registry — Government of Ontario (ServiceOntario) · openA
- Bulletin 2026-04: Land Services Fee Changes effective November 2, 2026 (Schedule I, Tariffs of Fees) — 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 (Schedule 22 Taxation and Payments-in-Lieu Summary; Schedule 80D Statistical Information) — Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing · openA
- Ontario Builder Directory (/api/builders, /api/buildersummary?id=) — Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) · openA
- Directory of Federal Real Property, bulk XML extract (dfrp-rbif.xml, 2025-11 snapshot) — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat · openA
- Whitby Mall - commercial property page (1615 Dundas Street East, floor area) — First Capital REIT · openA
- Thickson Place - commercial property page (80 Thickson Road South, floor area) — First Capital REIT · openA
- SmartCentres Whitby North - property page (address, square feet, ownership share) — SmartCentres REIT · openA
- SmartCentres Whitby Northeast - property page — SmartCentres REIT · openA
- SmartCentres Whitby Shores - property page — SmartCentres REIT · openA
- Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, Item 2 Properties (beverage packaging locations) — Ball Corporation (SEC EDGAR) · openA
- Celebrating a Century of Care: A Historical Timeline (1912 land purchase) — Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences · openA
- About Us (Ontario Shores described as a public teaching hospital) — Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences · openA
- Whitby, Ontario (2021 census land area and population) — Wikipedia · openA