Windmill Development Group eyes growing pipeline with new CEO Reeds at the helm
David Sali, OBJ
June 3, 2026
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In Ottawa, meanwhile, Windmill is planning to construct two rental apartment complexes of 12 and 18 storeys out of mass timber on a two-acre parcel of land owned by the National Capital Commission at 1460 Riverside Dr., near Alta Vista Drive. Windmill will serve as development manager for the project, which is expected to include 400 residential units and would be the largest mass timber development in Canada, according to Westeinde.
One of Windmill’s trademarks is its willingness to bring in other partners that have expertise in areas such as sustainable development and affordable housing. To that end, one of the buildings on Riverside Drive will be owned by Nesting Ground, an Ottawa-based non-profit corporation that works with community housing organizations and private developers to build affordable housing, while the other building will be owned by Ottawa Community Housing. In addition, B.C.-based Intelligent City, which specializes in pre-fabricated urban housing using digital design, robotics and other advanced techniques, will provide many of the components for the project. Intelligent City also collaborated with Windmill on the mass timber development in Toronto, manufacturing and installing infrastructure such as columns and parapets. As construction costs have skyrocketed over the past few years, it’s become more important for developers to find partners who can share the burden and bring their own strengths to each project, Reeds said. “We're fortunate that we've always approached those relationships and partnerships as a high priority,” he added. “For the next quite a few years, the real estate industry needs these partnership strategies and collaboration, and it's new for most groups. We're fortunate that we've been playing in that space for a long time. So a lot of it comes naturally, but it really requires a lot of innovative thinking and bringing all the different groups together. “What has allowed us to be successful in a lot of these partnerships is just being able to pause and accept that the way things used to be doesn't necessarily mean that is how it has to be going forward. And the more you can challenge that and think openly about it, the more you can help solve those problems and try to figure out how those different groups can work together to get the outcomes that we need.” While mass timber construction is not widely used in multi-residential projects, Reeds and Westeinde say it’s poised to move into the mainstream as the technology evolves and becomes more affordable. Building codes now allow timber buildings of up to 30 storeys, Reeds noted, adding wood lends itself well to modular construction — an increasingly popular approach to development in which various components of a building’s structure, such as columns and floor cassettes, are manufactured in mass quantities off-site and assembled later. Modular construction is more efficient, Westeinde explained, estimating it can shorten timelines on a typical multi-residential project by three to four months.
“The more you're able to kind of build in a controlled environment, the more you can focus on how you can get your cost curves down, versus sort of always being a piecemeal (construction process) on every site,” he said.
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https://obj.ca/windmill-development-group-appoints-reeds-ceo/
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