Several people pointed out this story – it appears that businesses are leaking out of the downtown core pushing metro office vacancy rates up to 7.4% from the 5.4% they started the year at.
..Avison Young expects that rate to rise as a result of further office closures that have been announced, but where tenants have yet to leave.
Online auction firm eBay, which announced it is closing its Burnaby operations, is one example of still-occupied space that will become available.
“I don’t know that we’ve felt the full impact of that [space] becoming available yet,” Darrell Hurst, principal of Avison Young’s Vancouver office, said in an interview. “There is still more to come.”
Hurst said the downturn has hit Metro Vancouver businesses across the board, including financial services, the resource sector and other service businesses. But he said there are longer-term signs of life. More prospective tenants are starting to view available space compared to earlier in the year, and some firms are committing to taking significant blocks of space in 2010 and beyond.
“So we’re reasonably optimistic for the latter half of 2010,” Hurst said, “and we may be pleasantly surprised by [the second quarter] of 2010.”
Avison Young broker Matthew Craig said that downtown, office tenants had vacated 487,775 square feet (45,315 square metres more office space than they leased in the first half of 2009, which is “roughly equivalent to the size of a new office tower.”
Full article in the Vancouver Sun.
