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Practice area — Indigenous real estate
An Indigenous firm in commercial, industrial and institutional real estate.
This is not a practice area we added. It is where we come from.
Reserve lands
In Canada, reserve lands are for the most part not financed like other land. The Indian Act restricts seizure, which rules out the conventional mortgage and requires structures built on designation, long-term lease or ministerial guarantee. The regime varies from one nation to the next, depending on whether it has adopted its own land code or concluded a self-government agreement.
Off reserve
Off reserve, many Indigenous organizations run into a different obstacle. A good part of their revenue comes from multi-year funding agreements that lenders read poorly. The work is then as much about explaining a revenue structure as it is about negotiating a price.
Timelines
Timelines differ as well. A community real estate decision generally goes through a council, sometimes through a consultation of members, and follows federal funding cycles. A standard transaction schedule does not hold.
Five families of clients.
Band councils and nation governments
Urban Indigenous service organizations
Economic development corporations
Health, justice and education organizations
Indigenous businesses
The capital is there. The structure is missing.
The capital exists
The Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation administers a ten-billion-dollar federal program for Indigenous equity participation in major projects. Across the country, roughly seventeen billion in guarantee capacity is available; by mid-2026, close to 1.8 billion had been deployed, across twenty-six transactions. Money is not what is missing.
Quebec starts further back
Quebec has no provincial loan guarantee program comparable to those of Alberta or Ontario. Nations here therefore build their files with fewer tools than their neighbours, at the exact moment when demand on their territories — critical minerals, energy, infrastructure — is intensifying.
What is blocking is real estate
Between guarantee capacity and an asset actually held, there is a chain of work: valuation, ownership structure, lease, governance, council calendar, accountability. That is real estate work, and it is ours.
“Panorama understands our decision processes and our reality.”
Ellen Filippelli — Executive Director
First Peoples Justice Center of Tiohtià:ke