After taking a bit of a breather during the pandemic, foreign tech firms look to be ramping up hiring plans for downtown Vancouver.
Dialectica Ltd. revealed Tuesday it’s opening a West Coast office this month with designs on hiring 100 workers within three years. This comes after the info services firm launched its first Canadian office in Montreal last year.
Founded in Greece in 2015 and now headquartered in London, England, the company is tapping Canada as its home base for North American operations.
While most Canadian workers will be in Montreal, Dialectica said the West Georgia Street office in Vancouver’s financial district is meant to meet demand for the company’s services in the Pacific time zone. The company plans to have 500 workers based in Canada in three to five years, making up half of its global workforce.
Dialectica specializes in providing investment and consulting companies with access to market research on everything from customers to competitors.
Its launch in Vancouver comes after American IT firm Kaseya announced in September it was leasing an additional 10,000 square feet at its downtown office at the Sun Tower on West Pender Street. The Miami-based company plans to hire another 75 workers in Vancouver by the end of next year.
The recent expansion plans may offer hope for those longing for a revitalized downtown core.
Foot traffic in downtown Vancouver is down 72.1% as of November 1, 2021, compared with March 2, 2020, according to a “vitality index” launched by Avison Young Inc. in September.
The index, which uses anonymized cellphone location data to measure foot traffic, is tracking North America’s biggest urban centres in a bid to measure the pace of return to downtown cores.
Vancouver ranks No. 12 among 23 North American cities. Downtown Calgary, with a 45.1% drop in foot traffic as of November 1, ranks first.
Meanwhile, Colin Scarlett, an executive vice-president with Colliers International Canada, said demand for downtown real estate has been surging since January 2021.
“There's going to be some announcements in the next couple of months that will be some of the largest deals done in Vancouver in quite some time,” he told BIV shortly before Kaseya announced it was expanding its local office.
“There's also been some huge winners [during the pandemic] in content creation, and life sciences … And those winners are reinvesting back into people and into space.”
Tech companies are accounting for the vast majority of the office space demand in the city: 62%, according to Colliers’ data.
While global tech giants like Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) have kept their Vancouver hiring steady throughout much of the pandemic, smaller and mid-size tech firms began tapping on the brakes last year.
Leading up to March 2020, firms such as Tipalti Inc., Grammarly Inc. and Brex Inc. all announced expansion plans within a few months of each other.
That pace soon dropped off during the COVID-19 crisis and Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. (TSX:SHOP) cancelled plans altogether for a 1,000-worker, 70,000-square-foot office at Four Bentall Centre on Dunsmuir Street.
“From the North American perspective, the skilled pool of Canadian tech workers paid in discounted Canadian dollars is a significant draw for companies contemplating where to expand operations,” according to a November 2020 report from real estate services firm CBRE Group Inc.
“In particular, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton provide the best value in North America when it comes to cost and quality. All are within several percentage points of coming in at half the cost of operating in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
