Lansdowne is a job site until 2030. Price the Glebe for it.

The Glebe's best amenity is currently a hole in the ground

Two tower cranes now stand over Lansdowne. That is the detail worth watching, because cranes mean the project has stopped being a fence and started being a building.

A July 21 memo from Tammy Rose, the City's General Manager of Infrastructure and Water Services, reported Lansdowne 2.0 on schedule and inside its approved budget six months into physical site works. Total spend to date is $59.5 million against the $418.8 million approved for the Event Centre and the North Side Stands replacement, which is 14 per cent of the money for roughly the first sixth of the calendar.

The site work behind that: about 60,000 cubic metres of soil hauled out, major excavation around 95 per cent complete, shoring finished, foundations underway since April, and utility upgrades beneath the north side of TD Place. Above-ground concrete and steel start this quarter.

The building is about to go vertical, which is when the Glebe stops experiencing this as an inconvenience and starts experiencing it as a landscape.

The hours are the part nobody mentions at the open house

Read the City's own construction notice and you get the number that actually matters to a homeowner.

Crews are permitted to work Monday through Friday from 7 am to 10 pm. If required, Saturday runs 7 am to 10 pm as well, and Sunday and statutory holidays run 9 am to 10 pm. The City has said plainly that crews will work into the evening through August and September to finish the stormwater, sanitary sewer, and water service connections for the Event Centre.

A second notice is running on top of that. Paver removal and excavation between the Aberdeen Pavilion and TD Place Arena started July 27 and continues to August 31, with haul trucks moving material off site and the south sidewalk on Exhibition Way closed.

None of that lowers anybody's assessed value. It does something more practical. If you are listing near Holmwood, Queen Elizabeth Drive, or the Exhibition Way end of the site, your 6 pm weeknight showing now competes with a backhoe, and your Saturday open house might too. In a hot market a buyer shrugs at that. In this market, where Ottawa Centre ran 5.6 months of inventory in July, a showing that feels unpleasant is a showing that does not produce an offer. That is how a nuisance quietly becomes a price problem.

2028 and 2030 are the dates to plan around

Phase one, the Event Centre, targets completion in the third quarter of 2028. Phase two, the demolition and rebuild of the North Side Stands, runs from late 2028 to substantial completion in the fourth quarter of 2030.

Work out where your hold period sits against that. Buying today with a genuine ten-year horizon, the construction is noise in both senses. You live through it and you eventually own beside a finished venue with a new public realm around it. Buying today and planning to sell in 2029, you have bought the mess and you will sell the mess, and your buyer will price it the way you should have.

The towers nobody will give you a unit count for

The redevelopment includes a private development of two residential towers. When council approved the plan in November 2023, it passed a motion from Coun. Glen Gower removing the 770-unit cap on those towers. A motion to add a third tower was dropped from the debate.

Go to the City's Lansdowne 2.0 project page today and the residential piece is described only as "hundreds of new residential units." No number, because there is no longer a cap. The eventual count belongs to a developer and a site plan process rather than to any published figure you can plan against.

That supply is pointed at the weakest segment in Ottawa. OREB's July numbers, released August 6, had the apartment benchmark down 5.2 per cent year over year, 5.4 months of inventory, a median 41 days on market, and a sales-to-new-listings ratio of 41.0 per cent. Ottawa Centre specifically ran 5.6 months of inventory, a 39.6 per cent ratio, and sales down 8.3 per cent.

I wrote the same story about Westboro and its 1,441 proposed units last week. The Glebe version is worse in one respect. The Westboro pipeline is at least countable.

Add 574 Bank while you are at it

The other Glebe file moving this year is the surplus parking lot at Bank and Chamberlain, behind the Glebe sign just south of the Queensway. Staff recommended transferring a 690 square metre portion to Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation for a nine-storey mid-rise of roughly 80 to 90 units, about 30 per cent of them below market. It cleared the finance and corporate services committee and went to council in June.

That one is no threat to anybody's house value. It is more competition for the same renters and entry-level buyers your Glebe investment condo is chasing. Worth knowing, not worth panicking about.

If you own a Glebe house, you are fine

Single-family detached is the one Ottawa segment that still posted a benchmark increase in July, up 0.6 per cent year over year at 3.2 months of inventory, with 714 sales, up 5.0 per cent. When I ran the Glebe numbers in July, detached homes there had averaged $1,640,539 over the trailing twelve months against townhouses at $1,064,337 and condos at $799,339.

The Glebe is three markets in one postal code, and the detached one is not the one Lansdowne threatens.

Two things anyway. If you are on Holmwood or Queen Elizabeth Drive and thinking about selling within four years, go before the North Side Stands come down in late 2028, not during. And do not pre-emptively discount for construction. Let a buyer raise it and answer with the completion dates, because a seller who apologizes first has already paid for it.

If you own or are buying a Glebe condo, this is your file

Price on today's closed comparables and nothing else. Not on the Lansdowne renders, not on 2030.

Buying, the four-year build argues for a lower number now, not for paying up now. Whoever buys from you in 2031 gets a finished Event Centre, finished stands, and a public realm they did not sit through. You are buying the years that pay for it, and the appraisal gap showing up on Ottawa condos this year means the bank may agree with me before your seller does.

Selling, get in front of the towers rather than into them. Nobody knows the unit count, and that uncertainty is worth more to you now, while it is abstract, than it will be when a sales centre opens with real floor plans and builder incentives.

The Glebe is still the best walkable neighbourhood in this city. It is going to be loud until 2030, and you should be paid for that rather than charged for it.

Want to know how much of this actually touches your specific block or building? Call me at 613-262-6545 or email fil@613realtor.ca, and if you want to see what is currently available, browse the Glebe.