Quote:
Originally Posted by LeftCoaster
While the City of Vancouver certainly likes their building on the thinner side, there is nothing stating a maximum or minimum size of an office plate. There are rules around residential plate sizes but office is not restricted at all.
And there are certainly tenants around the city in 3 or 4 locations, but that is true of every city, BMO in Toronto is in 23 locations downtown alone. The issue is the size of those tenants. Bottom line is the average tenant in the City of Vancouver is 3,500 sq ft. That number is closer to 20,000 in cities like Toronto or Calgary. Given that, the building size that maximizes return and minimizes risk is smaller in Vancouver that in other larger tenant markets. There just aren't that many major tenants (100,000sf+) looking to take large parts of buildings, so when someone proposes an 800,000 sq ft building it just doesn't make sense in this city, or at least hasn't historically. It's just too many tenants needed and too high a risk. The tech industry is starting to change this and I recon you'll see larger buildings and floorplates on average going forward but the size of office buildings has much more to do with the size of tenancies in Vancouver and not the City's policies.
You can take my word for it or not, but this is literally what I do for a living.
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So there's no rules or bylaws governing building setbacks from the street or FSR guidelines. Anyone can build anything want for office buildings? That's news to me.
And yes, no doubt that a smaller building with less vacant space will minimize risk, but it certainly does not "maximize" return in the long run as once you build that extra space, you can rent it out for as long as the building is standing. This has been done time and time again in cities (including Vancouver I might add).
But once again, perhaps you would attract larger tenants if you had more space to accommodate them? While I'm not saying taking a total leap of faith and constructing a large scale tower with no secured anchor tenants, but I am saying that adding and additional 100-200,000 sq feet is not out of the realm of possibility and as I have already pointed out, has already taken place in the city (with a much larger leap of faith than 100-200,000 sq feet actually).
I agree that I think we have seen *some* larger buildings and hopefully will continue to see this grow even more, its just that the growth is too slow, incremental, and insignificant when we are dealing with precious few development sites in the downtown core, and the scaling back of this project is another opportunity (somewhat) missed. And I highly doubt the development company spent all that money on designing this building at the size that they did, then decided, "you know what? Its too risky we should make it smaller." Could it possibly be that a certain entity (that shall remain nameless that may or may not be based around the Cambie and 12th area), provided a little mob style "encouragement" to perhaps pursue a redesign?
I'm not saying that the city openly doesn't
allow larger scale buildings but they do put just enough roadblocks up during the approval phase to get developers to see things their way. All you need is the UDP to say the building is "too imposing" and your pretty much done at that point (i.e. if you want this approved, you better come back at us with something smaller).
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