Pickleball, anyone? Mixed-use development includes courts to attract shoppers, office workers

Open this photo in gallery:

A Toronto-based company believes it has found a way to help commercial properties get out of the pickle they’re in trying to attract people back to offices and malls.

Fairgrounds Public Racket Club is installing pickleball courts across the country, including nine new courts in Toronto’s Cloverdale Mall, where Target once stood.

The entire 32-acre Cloverdale site at the intersection of Highway 427 and Dundas Street West is being redeveloped by QuadReal Property Group as a mixed community with new streets and retail, community amenities, parkland – and pickleball.

Pickleball is a way to bring people to public spaces, Fairgrounds co-founder Drummond Munro says.

“The developers we’re working with are trying to leverage their space to bring more traffic,” he says. “Pickleball has entered the social zeitgeist; you can attribute its growth to people’s desire to get out and be together after the pandemic.”

The sport facilities make sense for Cloverdale as it gets redeveloped, says Aaron Knight, senior vice-president of development at QuadReal.

“We are always looking for ways to enhance our spaces and provide engaging amenities. In the case of Cloverdale, we had the opportunity to do some adaptive reuse of space as part of our ongoing development projects,” he says. QuadReal is also working with Fairgrounds to put in pickleball courts at Assembly Park, a mixed-use development in Vaughan, north of Toronto.

In addition to Cloverdale and Vaughan, Fairgrounds is opening courts in downtown Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary, with more to come, Mr. Munro says. Last year it operated outdoor courts in Toronto at Yonge Street, north of Eglinton Avenue, but that property is now a construction site.

Pickleball is one of the fastest-growing sports in North America. According to Pickleball Canada, the organization that promotes the sport, a survey conducted in January found that 11 per cent of Canadian households have at least one member who plays at least once a month.

The game is similar to tennis but played on a smaller 20-by-44-foot court and is more forgiving on players’ muscles and bones. It uses racquets shaped vaguely like an old-fashioned carpet beater, and a plastic whiffle ball that makes a loud pop when players hit it.

“There just haven’t been a lot of places in Canada to play until now,” Mr. Munro says. His company also supports a related sport, called padel, which is played in an enclosed box similar to squash.

It’s not surprising that developers and building owners are interested in offering space to pickleball courts, says Bobby MacDonald, brokerage managing director for Southwestern Ontario at Colliers Canada. While the market is tightening for some types of retail real estate, such as open-air malls, the nationwide retail vacancy rate in Canada has been slowly growing over the past three years to 7.5 per cent, according to Colliers research.

Open this photo in gallery:

There is interest in filling vacant space with pickleball courts among developers here, but it’s a bigger trend south of the border, Mr. MacDonald says.

“We’re seeing it in a few retail buildings where there’s space – former big box stores or furniture stores, for example. But it’s happening more in the United States than here. We usually follow American sporting trends a bit later,” Mr. MacDonald says.

“We’re typically about two years behind the U.S.,” Mr. Munro agrees. “But there still aren’t a lot of places to play in Canada, so there’s room to grow.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if more buildings that have the right sort of space available start offering pickleball as an amenity for tenants,” says Benjamin Shinewald, president and chief executive officer of BOMA Canada, which represents building owners and managers.

“One of the biggest trends in recent years has been ‘amenitization’ – a response to tenant demand for amenities in the buildings where they work, live and play. These could be gyms, co-working spaces, coffee bars, conference facilities, food and dry-cleaning delivery services,” Mr. Shinewald says. “All these things are designed to improve the tenant experience. Why not pickleball?”

It still has to make good business sense to put pickleball into a project, says Anish Chopra, managing director and portfolio manager at Portfolio Management Corporation, who has analyzed pickleball as a business.

“It can be a reasonable idea if you can fit it into a retail or commercial place. The sport has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, but whether that translates into putting pickleball courts into underutilized commercial space is another question,” he says.

One problem is noise. Apparently, many people dislike the “thwack” of a well-hit pickleball. Neighbours in Chilliwack, B.C., went on a hunger strike to close local pickleball courts, and in 2022 a judge ordered Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to close six outdoor courts and slapped the town and the local pickleball club with fines of $1,000 after one nearby resident complained about the sound.

Canadian law is vague about how strictly local governments need to enforce their noise bylaws, according to a blog post by lawyers at the B.C. law firm of Lawson Lundell. Despite the Ontario court ruling, “It may surprise some to learn that municipalities and local governments are not actually required to enforce their own bylaws,” the lawyers say.

That doesn’t mean pickleball is going away, Mr. Shinewald says.

“It’s a clear trend that is popular right now. Since some people love it and others sometimes react to the noise, pickleball may be a bit trickier to amenitize,” he says.

“But as its popularity grows, and where it makes financial sense, I’m sure owners and managers will try to add it.”