My how things change.
A few years back, the worry in Calgary was the opening of The Bow in the city’s downtown core would produce a huge glut of office real estate.
That glut simply hasn’t materialized, and now one of Calgary’s largest suppliers of office real estate wants to move ahead with a project to surpass The Bow.
Brookfield Office Properties Inc. formally applied in late November for a new tower, to be known as either Brookfield Place, or 225 Sixth, denoting its prime location on Sixth Avenue S.W.
The new tower would surpass The Bow in height by approximately 11 metres, and hit 56 storeys in height.
A second 42-storey tower in the same block is also planned by Brookfield. Together, the two towers would bring roughly 2.8 million square feet of new space to a market that three years ago was projected to have vacancy of close to 20 per cent when The Bow opened.
As of the third quarter of 2012, vacancy in downtown Calgary office properties was sitting at about 4.56 per cent, though the rate was less than .44 per cent in top Class AA buildings, according to Colliers International.
Brookfield’s plans for all the new downtown space come despite the announcement by Imperial Oil Ltd. in the third quarter that it would be moving out of downtown and south to Remington Development’s Quarry Park project. Imperial is currently a tenant of Brookfield’s.
The announcement of Brookfield’s development application to the city came less than two weeks before the Calgary opened its new eight-kilometre LRT line that will make it easier for those living in the western section of the city to make it downtown for work. The line opened Dec. 10.
