An aging 12-storey office building in Edmonton has been converted to rental housing by Strategic Group of Calgary.
Strategic has been poring through its Alberta office inventory, and the 40-year old, 150,000-square-foot Harley Court site was the first selected for residential conversion.
It has been transformed into 177 apartments where rents will range from $1,300 for a studio, $1,400 to $1,500 for one-bedrooms and $1,600 to $1,800 per month for two bedrooms.
These are aggressive rents for Edmonton, where the median rent is now $1,250, according to a second-quarter 2019 survey by Rentals.ca.
Strategic’s office-to-home conversion isn’t the first in Alberta. A Calgary office building began the transformation into 65 units of rental housing last year and is now complete.
It may make sense for other Class B or C office tower owners to consider a residential conversion, since the office vacancy in Calgary, at 24 per cent, is the highest in Canada. Edmonton’s office vacancy rate has risen to 15 per cent following the addition of nearly 700,000 square feet of prime office space in the downtown last year, according to Altus Group.
