Commercial realtors still bullish on Ottawa’s office buildings The mix of tenants may change, but the opportunities are there By DAVID SALI
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or all those who believe Ottawa’s office towers are destined to become nothing but hollowed-out shells as the city emerges from the pandemic, Mike Church has a pile of documents he’d like to show you. “Office space is not dead,” says Church, the managing director of commercial real estate firm Avison Young’s Ottawa operations. As proof, the veteran broker cites the growing stack of open files on his desk – now numbering close to two dozen – that include sale and lease agreements in various stages of completion. If commercial real estate is no longer in demand, Church says, the market has a funny way of showing it. “I think people have finally woken up to the fact that life is going to go on and eventually we’re all going to get back to (the office) in some
fashion,” he says. With the future of the office a hot topic everywhere as employers around the world grapple with what workspaces will look like post-pandemic, Church and other local industry observers say that while office space is here to stay, it will likely be configured very differently once people start returning to their cubicles. As an example, Church points to a client that initially planned to ditch a hefty portion of its office footprint before deciding to retain it all and redesign it to allow for greater physical distancing and other health and safety measures. “The use of office space is going to evolve over time,” explains Church, adding that companies will likely invest more money in upgrading HVAC systems and installing technology such as virus-killing UV systems as they retool buildings for a post-pandemic world. “COVID has been an
opportunity to reimagine everything.” Shawn Hamilton, vice-president of business development at Canderel Group’s Ottawa office and president of BOMA Ottawa, is equally bullish on the local office sector’s prospects. “There’s no reason for us to abandon the optimism that we had going into the pandemic,” he says. Companies were already moving toward a hybrid work model that saw workers splitting their time between home and the office before COVID hit, Hamilton says, and the health crisis simply shifted that process into high gear. The former commercial real estate broker says when cornerstone tenants such as the federal government downsized in the past, other clients such as Ottawa’s burgeoning tech startups picked up the slack. He believes history will repeat itself this time. “I think having some space freed up by the federal government is uncomfortable because it challenges our comfort zones, but I think it creates oxygen for the private sector and the BOMA Ottawa Commercial Space Directory 2021-22 21
