Property Americas perspective
Each aspect of our business made significant contributions to our financial success in 2021. Despite a great deal of uncertainty at the beginning of the year, we proactively managed pandemic-related challenges, significantly advanced our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives and actively participated in the economic rally that took place.
Given the strength of the investment sales market in the second half of the year, we completed property dispositions and took advantage of opportunistic acquisitions. Our portfolio of owned properties outperformed US and Canadian benchmarks for rent collection, and we maintained a 93.4% average occupancy which helped facilitate our strong valuation increases. Our Development team completed and broke ground on several projects in Washington, D.C. and Vancouver, enabling us to exceed our condominium sales targets for the year. Our Finance team locked in low rates on long-term loans for several properties to increase our capacity and we implemented new technologies to improve and automate systems across the business.
Our long-term capital partners joined us for the third iteration of our True North partnership where we completed several deals that will deliver much needed housing through our Structured Development Finance Programme. Looking to the future, we solidified our residential investment theses for our next value-add and build-to-core programmatic co-investment opportunities in pursuit of like-minded capital partners.
In 2021, we set a clear objective to focus and build on our ESG ambitions; we reported to Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) for the first time and established a framework for our 2030 net zero carbon pathway. Our local social impact activities focused on housing, education and supply chain diversity while we continued to engage employees and improve our practices through employee-led Equity, Diversity & Inclusion groups.
US and Canadian economies both enjoy strong fundamentals and while 2021 was an impressive year for North American real estate markets (US all-property total returns grew annually at 10% and Canadian all-property total returns grew annually at 2.4%), extraordinarily high inflation and geopolitically fuelled commodity pricing risk will continue to put pressure on central banks to raise interest rates. In 2022, we will stay focused on the various sources of uncertainty and how the corresponding interest rate response will be received by investors.
While maintaining our discipline, we will advance our significant development pipeline and continue to pursue Investment and Structured Development Finance opportunities that will benefit from the continued recovery of our cities. As our cities recover, we will double down on our social and environmental objectives as we begin to operationalise our 2030 net zero carbon commitment.
