Posted Apr 16, 2026, 12:02 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2015
Posts: 15,444
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Quote:
Near-empty pipeline portends interesting future for Vancouver office
The overall office vacancy rate in Vancouver ended 2025 at 12.4 per cent, according to Avison Young, after steadily rising from a low of sub-five per cent in Q4 2019. Gardner described it as a “stubborn” vacancy because the rate hasn’t budged for about a year.
Rank, SVP of commercial leasing at QuadReal, which sold The Post in downtown Vancouver to Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega for $1.2 billion last fall, said Vancouver is a “difficult market to operate in” because demand is uncertain, there are not enough tenants, and the market cannot currently count on new entrants.
A not-insignificant amount of activity in the market, from a leasing perspective, has involved companies playing musical chairs with their spaces. After moving into the South Tower of The Post a few years ago, Amazon began moving into the North Tower two weeks ago, consolidating employees from the nearby Telus Garden and leaving behind an amount of space that Rank said is nearly two-thirds of a new build.
McQueen, VP of asset management and portfolio strategy for Nicola Wealth Real Estate, described the firm's office portfolio as exclusive to the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver. She sees smaller office buildings like the ones Nicola is involved in as more manageable than the large triple-A office buildings.
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A large portion of the 55-minute panel was dedicated to discussing the trend of show suites – suites landlords fit out and make occupancy-ready, instead of the traditional method of holding shell space and then going through the tenant improvement process.
Oughton of Allied Properties REIT, which owns the 24-storey Deloitte Summit in downtown Vancouver after buying out Westbank in 2024, called show suites a “tried-and-true strategy” Allied has been utilizing on a “targeted” basis. He said tenants oftentimes do not want to manage a construction project like tenant improvements and prefer a “frictionless” experience.
He acknowledged show suites are a “loss leader” for Allied, but said they model the investment within the larger context of the life of the full building rather than within the narrower context of a particular lease or term. Rank echoed the sentiment, saying landlords just can’t sit on shell space anymore and have to remove barriers for tenants to remain competitive.
Koldingnes, partner and design director at EDIT Studios, an interior design studio for commercial projects, outlined several showsuite projects — with photos and floorplans — she has been involved in. Included were 601 W. Hastings for PCI Developments and 1075 W. Georgia for KingSett Capital and Reliance Properties.
In those cases, Koldingnes said, the landlords opted to start with a small number of suites before fitting out entire floors and both saw the spaces leased out quickly. Her prediction for 2026 is that show suites will grow in scale, be adopted by more landlords and with bigger floorplates.
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https://renx.ca/empty-pipeline-portends-interesting-future-for-vancouver-office-sector
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