Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Nexus REIT first quarter conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kelly Hanczyk, the Chief Executive Officer, for opening remarks. Please go ahead.
I'd like to welcome everyone to the 2021 first quarter results conference call for Nexus REIT. Joining me today is Robert Chiasson, CFO of the REIT. Before we begin, I'd like to caution with regard to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Certain statements made during this conference call may constitute forward-looking statements, which reflect the REIT's current expectations and projections about future results. Also, during this call, we will be discussing non-GAAP measures. Please refer to our MD&A in the REIT's other securities filings, which can be found at sedar.com for cautions regarding forward-looking information and for information about non-GAAP measures. All right. To say the REIT is off to a fast start in 2021, I think is a little bit of an understatement. To date, we have closed on CAD 117.5 million of well-tenanted industrial deals, adding approximately 1.3 million square feet to the portfolio.
Six of these properties are located in London, Ontario, where we expect to see significant upside as leases roll over and renew at higher rents. We have the potential to expand the buildings here in London. I think this was an excellent purchase for us. We have waived conditions on an additional three single-tenant industrial properties with 400,000 sq ft of GLA to be acquired for CAD 44.75 million. Two of these three assets are new builds. We're under conditional purchase and sale agreements and due diligence on another 600,000 sq ft of industrial properties to be acquired for CAD 100 million. We expect to close on those in June, July. In addition, we are in various stages of discussions on another approximately CAD 125 million of industrial deals.
I think with these deals, we are well on our way to increasing our industrial weighting, and our NOI generated from our industrial properties should easily exceed the 75% of our total NOI by the end of the year. Our fundamentals continue to be strong with debt to GBV decreasing to 45.8%, and once cash from our recent equity raise is deployed, we expect our payout ratio to be back in the low 80s or better. Our occupancy for the quarter was up slightly from last quarter. In the industrial portfolio, our main vacancy is a 25,000 sq ft industrial space at 41 Royal Vista Drive in Calgary. We're hopeful we will get this leased over the summer as we've seen some recent activity at the site.
In our last call, I mentioned we will have 126,000 sq f t office space at Place 400 in Saint John, New Brunswick, come back to us on April 30th. We've been marketing this space, and we are seeing interest, and we're in discussions with three separate groups for portions of the space. Over the summer, we hope we can mitigate the impact of this vacancy. Over the next 12 months, we have approximately 291,000 sq f t of expiries, including the 26,000 sq ft mentioned above, where approximately 77,000 sq ft has been renewed or in discussion to renew, and we're moving along well on the retention front here. In Richmond, B.C., we're progressing nicely with our renovations to fit out the space for new tenants.
As mentioned previously, upon completion, which is expected to be in and around September, October, our NOI will increase to approximately CAD 165,000 per month. We also expect a significant bump to our net asset value upon completion. Additionally, cap rates in Richmond continue to trend lower. This bodes well. We also have the ability to add additional square footage to this project in the future, which we will be looking at shortly. In Montreal, we continue to work with a developer on the sale of some excess land at De Lorimier that would be proved lucrative to the REIT over the next couple of years. The developer is moving along with the approvals from the city, and after a redraft of the plan to meet the city concerns, it looks positive for a late fourth quarter or early first quarter of next year approval.
On the disposition front, we recently received offers for a small retail property in Gainsborough, Ontario that we're working with a group for the sale of this asset. We'll continue to look at other non-core office and retail assets over the next several months and looking at divesting of some there as well. I will now hand it over to Rob Chiasson to give greater detail of the REIT's financials.
Thanks, Kelly. I'd first like to just clarify, at March 31st, we had 291,000 sq f t of expiries over the next 12 months, of which approximately 77% has already been renewed or is in discussions. I think we may have said 77,000 sq f t previously, but 77%. We're well advanced in discussions and renewals on those properties. We successfully completed our CAD 35 million equity offering on March 4th, issuing 4,255,000 units, including the full exercise of the over allotment. As Kelly mentioned, we've been successful in putting properties under contract.
In the quarter, our weighted average number of units outstanding increased by 1,323,788 units on account of the offering, and we paid CAD 227,000 of distributions on the units issued in the March 4th offering. This had the impact of increasing our AFFO payout ratio from 84.2%, which it would have been if not for the offering, to 87.7%.
Impacted our per unit measures by approximately CAD 0.007. As we put our equity to work and close on the recently announced and other acquisitions we're working on, we will see our payout ratio and per unit measures improve. On April 1st, we closed on the CAD 103.5 million acquisition of six industrial properties in London, Ontario. We issued approximately 65% of the purchase price in units and have the ability to increase our debt on these properties to acquire additional industrial assets. We expect that we will not see the full benefits of rebalancing our capital structure following the London deal and deploying proceeds from the equity raise until the third and fourth quarters of this year. Same -store NOI was relatively flat year-over-year, with rental rate increases more than offsetting the impact of the 25,000 sq ft vacancy in Calgary that Kelly mentioned.
G&A expense was higher in the quarter, with approximately CAD 207,000 of one-time TSX listing fees related to our graduation from the TSXV to the TSX, and RSU expenses were approximately CAD 210,000 higher in Q1 as compared to Q4. Just due to the timing and vesting of the RSU grants. We continue to have strong liquidity and had CAD 50 million of cash on our balance sheet at the end of the quarter, ready to deploy for acquisitions. Cash collections continue to be strong, with 97.9% of Q1 rents having been collected to date. I'll now turn it back to Kelly.
Thanks, Rob. I'll open up the line to answer any questions that you guys may have.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question comes from Frédéric Blondeau with iA Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good afternoon. It looks like there's a fair amount of new supply of industrial space coming across the country. I was wondering what your views are on the new supply and what you see on the ground in your current and target markets.
Yeah. Well, the things that we have right now, there isn't a lot of guides coming up for renewal, so we're in good shape on the industrial side for sure. A lot of the recent deals we've done are longer-term leases. The two new builds are 10 and 15 years, so it really wouldn't even affect us. The demand for industrial right now is huge. I think when we're talking about new supply, you're looking at a lot in GTA and things like that. If you look down in London where we've just purchased, there's very little new supply right now coming on. That bodes very well for our renewals going forward, especially in that market. It's very tight, and I think it's one that we're going to excel in. Overall, I think our portfolio really isn't affected too much with that.
You're talking about big box new warehousing being built and the majority of it is in GTA. You've got stuff in Calgary, Balzac, and areas like that are going to continue to expand. I just see it as a positive. The take-up on it is large. There is big demand for industrial space right now.
Is it fair to say that you have positive views on pretty much all your current markets, or there might be some of them that you have more on the radar in terms of new supply?
Yeah. Well, London's a big one now, right? There's no concerns there. We're in Cambridge and tenants have been there forever. They're not going to leave. Barrie, same thing. I look at Calgary and that area, and we have some longer-term tenants still in there, so it doesn't really affect us. Our Montreal portfolio, as we see things roll, we've seen positive on the rental rates there in Montreal. Montreal's got huge demand as well. I think our portfolio's just situated a little differently, I would say, overall. I just see positive right now.
Okay. That's great. That's fair. It looks like you'll be on that 75% exposure to industrial fairly shortly. If we include Richmond, how should we view the rest of the portfolio? What should we be expecting in the short term?
What do you mean by that?
What's your ultimate goal in it? Would you like to be more in the 90%-100% exposed to industrial? Yeah, what's your end game?
Yeah. We're continuing. Everything we look at, everything we have under contract, everything that we're looking at is in the industrial sector. We'll start to look at divesting some of our other assets, especially maybe perhaps some of the wholly owned assets that we have in Montreal office and retail. That alone will move that weighting significantly up as well. As we continue to add industrial product, you'll then see that weighting continue to grow, and we're ultimately, I don't want to peg us, but If things are going in the first half of the year, the second half of the year like they're going in the first half of the year on the pipeline, it's very active so that number can move significantly, especially if we move a couple assets on the retail side or on the office.
Right. No, that makes total sense. I guess in that sense, is it fair to say that the rest of the portfolio should be somewhat considered non-core, or it's still a bit too early to call that non-core at this stage?
Yeah. I'd say it's still a bit too early. We are moving towards an ultimate goal of the industrial weighting being the majority of our portfolio. Whether that is 90% or 95% down the line, it's going to take us a little bit to get there. That is our ultimate goal for sure.
Yeah. Got it. No, that makes total sense. Last one from me. Would you contemplate any development projects on the industrial side or, again, it would be a bit too early to?
Yeah, no. To be honest, in our Richmond facility, we can add on immediately a 70,000 sq ft building, and we're looking at that and I'm working with the developer there, the vendor, of what we're going to build, and we could do some stacked industrial. We can do that at the site. That's a possibility for us there. There's a couple other sites that there's a potential to do kind of a development play with them on those. Our London guys, I think we could add up to about 500,000 sq ft.
Yeah
We are trying to do that right now. On the greenfield side, we're not really, but expanding our buildings and looking at it more from that front, I think definitely. It's just on the greenfield side, it's just getting that capital to work. Right now, I think at this stage of our growth, that'll come along in the next couple of years for us.
No, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much. That's it for me.
Thanks, Fred.
Once again, if you have a question, please press star then one. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Kelly Hanczyk for any closing remarks.
I want to thank everyone for taking the time to be on the call, and hopefully over the next several weeks, we'll just continue to announce some additional deals and continue to build the industrial portfolio going forward. I look forward to talking to everybody next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.