Canada’s national office vacancy rate rose to a record 16.3% in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest report from commercial real estate brokerage CBRE.
Canadian landlords expecting workers to return to offices vacated during the pandemic were delivered a blow by the Omicron variant of the respiratory disease that prompted companies to give up leases or delay taking out new ones.
The high vacancy rate was reflected in Toronto, Canada’s largest city and financial capital, where office vacancies reached 14.8% in Q1.
With the renewed delay in returning to offices, many companies had been working remotely for the better part of the past two years. That appears to have emboldened more tenants to vacate their office spaces entirely to save money.
In the first three months of the year, nearly two million square feet (186,000 square meters) of offices become vacant nationwide in Canada, the CBRE report showed.
Meanwhile, the completion of new buildings brought almost 700,000 square feet of new space to the national market, with nearly 15 million square feet still under construction.
