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H&R owns and rents out a mix of apartment buildings, offices, and industrial properties across North America.
H&R Real Estate Investment Trust is a landlord. It buys buildings, rents them out, and collects monthly rent cheques. The trust splits its business into three main buckets: residential apartments (roughly half of revenue), industrial warehouses and distribution centres, and a shrinking pile of office towers, mostly in downtown Toronto and the U.S. Think of it as a shopping cart of different property types — when offices wobble, apartments and warehouses keep the rent flowing.
The residential side is the growth engine today. H&R has been pouring money into new apartment towers, especially in Toronto and other big Canadian cities, where rents keep climbing and vacancy is low. The industrial side is steady: warehouses for e-commerce and logistics, long leases, reliable tenants. The office side is the problem child — fewer people commute downtown, so some tenants downsized or left, and H&R has been selling office buildings to cut its exposure. That pivot matters: the trust is slowly turning from an office-heavy landlord into a residential and industrial one.
H&R started in 1994 and went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1996. Like most REITs, it must pay out most of its taxable income as dividends, so it's popular with income-seeking investors. It funds growth by selling older buildings, refinancing debt, and reinvesting cash. The big question for investors: can H&R keep selling offices without taking painful losses while its apartment and warehouse bets grow fast enough to pick up the slack? That's the whole story in one line.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026