CALGARY | Manulife | 124 M / 408 FT | 27 Floors

[Surrealplaces]

Manulife already has an anchor tenant for this one and plans to go ahead with tower which will be 27 floors, and 564,000 sq ft..

Architect - SOM
Developer - Manulife

Manulife going ahead with two office tower developments in Western Canada

Manulife Financial Corp.’s massive real estate arm is expanding in Western Canada – and increasingly choosing to develop towers rather than buy them.

The insurance company, whose real estate portfolio amounted to more than $8.5-billion at the end of 2012, is set to announce next week that it will develop a 27-storey office tower in downtown Calgary, bringing its portfolio in the city to about 1.3 million square feet.

The lead tenant will be Brion Energy (previously called Dover Operating Corp.), a three-year-old Calgary-based joint venture between Athabasca Oil Corp. and PetroChina Company Ltd. that operates two leases in the oil sands near Fort McMurray.

“We want to make a greater allocation to Western Canada. We strongly believe in the fundamentals there and we think that the eastern markets are very crowded right now,” said Ted Wilcocks, global head of asset management at Manulife Real Estate.

Manulife announced this week that it has begun construction on 980 Howe St., a 16-storey Vancouver tower that many thought would not go ahead, given the city’s building boom. But Manulife managed to secure engineering and consulting firm BGC as a lead tenant.

The Calgary tower, which will be 564,00 square feet, will sit on land that Manulife already owns, and replace a 41-year-old 88,000-square foot office building (as well as a former restaurant and retail site and a parkade)...


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on...ments-in-western-canada/article13466688/

Manulife by Calgary Renders, on Flickr