Henry Zavriyev is building a retail real estate empire by following a strategy of buying shopping centres outside Canada’s largest cities that are being divested by institutional investors.
Zavriyev runs Leyad, a fast-growing owner of shopping centres and big-box retail properties across multiple provinces including Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Alberta. He noticed that longtime institutional owners started losing interest in their regional real estate holdings as they began to concentrate capital in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver after the global financial crisis in 2008.
Real estate assets in other markets remained in their portfolios but became less of a focus for leasing and day-to-day operations as investors "treated everything outside those markets like it wasn’t even Canada," Zavriyev said in an interview at his office overlooking historic Place d'Armes in Old Montreal.
Zavriyev said institutional landlords largely rely on third-party managers and primarily lease to national tenants. When Leyad buys a property, it keeps the on-site teams it inherits but takes a more active role and is willing to lease space more aggressively, including to smaller local businesses.
“They’re not on the ground working it every day,” he said, referring to institutional owners. “We are.”
Zavriyev, now 32, got his start in Montreal after following an untraditional path into real estate. He worked a series of jobs including call centres, painting and landscaping before becoming a janitor in an apartment building, a job that led to his entry into the property business after a landlord showed him how to manage and lease units.
Started with rental units
Zavriyev began renting apartments for owners, fixing them up, furnishing them and leasing them at higher rents. That work generated the capital he used to buy his first building in Montreal, which he renovated and sold.
He moved into the larger multifamily market, often buying buildings with major issues, including fire damage, structural problems and deferred maintenance. Over time, the experience changed how he viewed the residential rental business.
“There’s always conflict,” he said. “You can do everything right and still end up in a difficult position with tenants.”
He left that sector to focus on other commercial properties and then retail, making a series of shopping centre purchases in 2023 by targeting under-performing properties that required active leasing and direct involvement. Many purchases came from institutional owners selling properties outside their core markets.
Zavriyev said Leyad reinvested capital from apartment sales into those deals, focusing on retail properties where hands-on management could change their financial performance.
Zavriyev travels constantly to visit properties across the country, often moving between communities that are hours apart. He recalls driving across Saskatchewan and stopping in towns where access to basic retail is limited and distances between larger retail centres are long. In many of those places, residents drive one or two hours to reach major stores or pick up equipment.
When a large retailer in In Kindersley closed, Zavriyev said he spoke with a customer who relied on the store for supplies and now had to drive hours to replace it. “He had tears in his eyes,” Zavriyev said. “That’s the reality in these places.” Leyad later brought in another national tenant to backfill the space.
Smaller communities rely on retail
That kind of customer reaction explains his interest in the sector. In smaller markets, retail is not just discretionary shopping, Zavriyev said. It is where people go for basic goods and services, and often where communities gather.
That perspective carries over into how the company leases space. National tenants that anchor a centre attract traffic, but Zavriyev said a portion of space has to go to smaller operators that institutional landlords often avoid. “They want [the credit rating of] the nationals,” he said. “But we take the locals too.”
The company works with local economic development groups and actively looks for businesses that want to expand or open in those communities. It also uses short-term leases to keep space occupied while building out the property's longer-term tenancy.
“We don’t accept vacancy,” he said. “If there’s space, we find someone to fill it.”
Leyad has grown quickly. Zavriyev said the company now has about 400 employees across Canada, up from roughly 100 a few years ago.
Zavriyev said his confidence in retail comes from what he sees across that portfolio. Foot traffic has increased, vacancy has declined, and tenant demand remains steady.
“There’s been modest population growth, very little new construction and steady demand,” he said. “Those fundamentals are what matter.”
Leyad is now extending that strategy to larger and more complex properties, including a shopping centre in downtown Victoria the firm is set to acquire.
As the business grows, Zavriyev said he keeps the focus on properties where demand is clear and where close management can improve performance. “If I walk into a property and believe it will still be there in 20 years, that’s what matters,” he said.
For now, that continues to lead him to properties that large institutional owners still hold but no longer work in the same way. “In a lot of these places, the mall is everything,” he said.