A new report from CBRE Limited shows commercial vacancies in downtown Calgary remain high.
As of the end of 2025 the overall vacancy rate in the downtown sits at 30.4 per cent.
Michael Hoffman, vice president and managing director with CBRE Limited, says turbulence within the oil and gas sector continue to reverberate within the real-estate landscape.
“Mergers and acquisition activity within the oil and gas sector has resulted in a lot of sub-leased space,” explained Hoffman. “So that’s vacancy coming on the market as companies get acquired and don’t need as much office space in the downtown core.”
The net-rentable area within the downtown, according to the report, is just over 41 million square feet, and certain space is being sought after more.
“We’re seeing that fight for quality,” Hoffman remarked. “So our class ‘A’ buildings are outperforming the ‘B’ and ‘C’ class for tenants.”
Overall, the changes are taking hold though, and Calgarians should view it as the new normal, says Calgary Economic Development CEO Brad Parry.
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“We’re not gonna see people come in and take – you know – a million square feet off the market in one fell swoop,” Parry noted. “You’re going to see little ones, like ten-thousand square feet, twenty, thirty, fifty-thousand square foot chunks start to bring that down slowly.”
Programs like the City of Calgary’s downtown office conversion program have taken a bite out of some of those less desirable buildings, with the end goal of converting 6-million square feet of under utilized office space by 2031.
“The city’s put the right kind of incentives in place to bring in the capital into help convert those buildings,” Parry said, “remove some of the lower class buildings and bring that vibrancy back into downtown. And I think we’re starting to see the fruits of those programs starting to take hold.”
Meanwhile, recent changes to immigration policies have slammed the breaks on inter-provincial and international migration. Alberta’s economic dashboard shows only Alberta and Prince Edward Island saw positive net migration, with 5,849 people moving to Alberta in Q3, down from 42,311 from the same quarter of 2024.
“We think that it’s a re-balancing of the marketplace,” noted Parry. “It gives it the chance to catch our breath, get caught back up on housing, get caught back up on some of the other services that we need to have.”
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