Downtown offices are the most vacant they’ve been in a decade… and Calgary is the emptiest of them all.
According to commercial real estate firm CBRE, the national downtown office vacancy rate currently stands at around
18.9 per cent, with areas including Edmonton and the Waterloo Region in Ontario experiencing some of the highest vacancy rates.
Calgary’s vacancy rate has been slowly rising since
the 2014 oil price crash (source:
CBC), but has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic which began affecting CowTown in March 2020.
As a result, a number of downtown office buildings are being converted into homes, hotels and university spaces, with the
latest developments - conversion of buildings into two residential projects and one hotel - announced last week.
Pierre Bertrand, principal of Bertrand Management Consulting, expressed via LinkedIn that he hopes these new residences “get rid of the ‘ghost town’ syndrome that besets downtown cores at night and weekends when all the office workers go home”.
However, not everyone is as optimistic about the new developments. “So goes your downtown, so goes your city. This is troubling for cities across Canada.” wrote
Jason Aebig, CEO of the Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce.
Likewise change management practitioner Jag Badhan warned that the new housing was “not a good thing for our economy”.
“This is impacting employment and survival of small companies including mom and pop stores,” he continued.
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