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When that 3 million square feet of office space gets built in Vancouver, will there be enough tenants to fill it all? The hot question these days

April 18th, 2013 · 8 Comments

The office-tower boom in Vancouver (and Burnaby, New West and Surrey) never ceases to produce chatter in the halls of the development/broker sector.

It was the topic again at the city’s recent real-estate forum, where several panelists speculated on the impact of all that space hitting the market.

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  • Tiktaalik

    Unless their plan has recently changed the Facebook office is a temporary one year one so that they can train new grads to send to the bay area.

  • brilliant

    @Tiktaalik 1- You don’t think Gregory & cabal will miss a chance to boast they landed Facebook do you?

  • Bill McCreery

    Office developers tend to do their homework. Although they may be a bit off, it has been a while since Vancouver has added much top end office space, and these things tend to go in cycles. I wouldn’t panic, providing there’s a bit of a built in cushion.

  • Tessa

    A Vancouver Sun article might add some context here: Vancouver currently has the costliest Class-A office space in Canada. Given that, I’d say landowners have lots of flexibility on the price side to retain tenants. I’d also say that it’s hardly a problem that all this office space is coming on the market – rather, it’s probably long overdue.

    Throughout the region, office space that is close to skytrain and in denser neighbourhoods tends to rent for a high premium. Hopefully this new office space will lower prices a little bit, and allow companies that might otherwise be forced to locate far into suburban, car-dependent office parks to move downtown or to another regional centre. Or, allow companies already in those places to move to better locations.

    http://www.vancouversun.com/business/commercial-real-estate/Vancouver+Class+office+Canada+costliest/8256700/story.html

  • Joe Just Joe

    As Frances touched on in the article, a big benefit of all the new AAA construction is that existing buildings will need to be upgraded to compete. We are starting to see a number of existing buildings apply for LEED certification in order to attract tenants, building in new amenties such as fitness centres and end of trip facilities. Office workers are going to score pretty well with this new round of competition.

  • teririch

    We are vacating the offices we have leased for the past 10+ years.

    The landlord hiked the rents up, considerabley.

    Odd, since 50% or the building is empty.

    The company across the hall from us, also a long time tenant, left this month; we are out in June.

    There is speculation that they are trying to ‘force’ renters out in order to take the building down and put up ….condos.

  • Guest

    Office buildings can also be converted to condos – like the Electra or the Qube – but the City has a limited tolerance for that – especially in the Cnetral Business District. And the sh*tstorm raised by the Jameson House residents will probbaly have the City thinking twice about allowing condos in the heart of the CBD (where anything under 10 storeys could conceivably be replaced with a taller office tower without setbacks).

  • Andrew Browne

    This issue is more complex than it might seem initially. Vancouver is known for meagre availability of large contiguous chunks of office floor. This new availability will trigger years of shuffling around as businesses consolidate leases and change expansion plans (standard case: business starts downtown and continues growth, gets pressed for space and makes do, reaches breaking point and can’t find anything at all downtown, moves to Broadway).