Vancouver’s commercial real estate market has rebounded with enough demand to spur the groundbreaking of one or more new office towers downtown this year, according to a report released Thursday by commercial real estate services company Avison Young.
“Compared to the rest of North America we’ve had a pretty healthy rebound in the real estate market across pretty well all the sectors – investment, leasing and industrial, leasing and office, leasing and retail,” said Avison Young principal Bob Levine.
Levine said a lack of significant commercial construction in Vancouver over the past four or five years has created pent-up demand downtown for at least one new office tower.
“There’s very little space available for the larger tenants,” he said, noting this category would include people looking for spaces of 50,000 square feet and up. “A number of them are looking at what they can do to expand their own businesses, and they can’t do it in the existing stock to rent.”
Levine said the building most likely to proceed, based on its progress with City of Vancouver planners, is Bentall Kennedy’s proposed tower at Alberni and Thurlow.
“But there’s lots of other developers that are trying to find sites or trying to position themselves to get approvals from the city to build additional office towers,” he said. “I think the perception is one tower is not going to do it.”