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Downtown Real Estate

Also, not all older buildings are readily convertible to residential. At some point if you have to spend a lot of money to do this and the quality is still poor (ex. units with few or no windows, small cramped spaces or not located near services or supports), it may be better to just spend that money to build something better from scratch or elsewhere.

It is not as simple as some people think, if it was this probably already would have been done.
 
TAS said:
I don't get triggered by things like 'Alberta's largest city' versus when you read about Edmonton 'Alberta's capital city' - it's just another way of saying Edmonton or Calgary so you are not repeating the same word over and over again in a news story.

Alberta's festival city - Edmonton
Stampede city - Calgary
Etc etc
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Yes, it is hype. I suppose if the audience is out of province people who really do not know much about our cities, a bit more info might be helpful, but then this can also be misleading and cause people to think one city is much larger or smaller than the other.

So, I propose instead of Alberta's largest city, it should read, Alberta's largest city, but really not by very much or adding actual population figures in as additional information. If you want to add words, they really should be more informative, not just hype.
 
Stevey_G said:
Trust me it’ll come. There’s millions of people who can’t afford to live in other parts of the country and an exodus is inevitable.

Trust me it’s not a good thing. Real estate should not be considered an investment and high housing costs are crippling economies across the country. Edmonton with its low housing costs means everyone has more disposable income for things that benefit the economy and their quality of life.

Keep those prices low and drive them even lower.
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Real. People outside Alberta often enter Calgary as a gateway city, then realize there’s an almost equally large but more affordable metropolis 3 hours north and the whole thing shifts towards equilibrium as people move up.
 
Gronk! said:
Applies to all Canadian cities

retail-insider.com

Canadian Cities Seeing Empty Downtown Spaces and Food Deserts Amid Reduced Foot Traffic [Op-Ed]

Sylvain Charlebois discusses the future of grocery and foodservice in Canada's urban cores as foot traffic and spending is down following the pandemic.
retail-insider.com retail-insider.com
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I know we discussed this before but I still never understand it- or maybe it is starting to happen more now.

With the value of downtown office buildings decreasing with high vacancy rates, are lease rates for CRUs going down accordingly? Why would and should a business looking for a location pay more to operate downtown given what was just outlined in the posted article?
 
Lower lease rates would help create equilibrium

I suspect this will be a temporary trend, kind of how everyone said travel was done but it came back strongly.

Gentle skew towards entertainment and leisure, plus a couple years, will do wonders for downtowns.
 
As folks who know this part of the industry better than I do, moving lease rates down is often less tenable, viable or possible than improving the tenant improvements (T.I.s) or other non rate incentives such as parking ratios or amenity packages etc.
 
IanO said:
As folks who know this part of the industry better than I do, moving lease rates down is often less tenable, viable or possible than improving the tenant improvements (T.I.s) or other non rate incentives such as parking ratios or amenity packages etc.
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But I've read some office towers here and certainly in Calgary reduced their costs for leasing office space per sq.ft.

If they are doing that for office space, why not for CRUs in the same building?

And didn't you say something earlier about supply and demand?
 
archited said:
CRUs are a hard sell as long as y'all keep supporting Amazon and the like.
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It's also a hard sell as long as the lease rates are ridiculously high.
We also gotta think about the solution that is possible, not the ideal... And there is also the "chicken and the egg" conundrum here, and specifically in the case of Edmonton, it has 3 players: online shopping, suburban malls and street retail...
We want people to buy from the latter, but right now, even if we managed to get people to stop buying from Amazon and the likes, they'll still flock to suburban malls, because that's all there is (and it will continue to be like this unless there's come sort of incentive to open somewhere else)
 
ChazYEG said:
It's also a hard sell as long as the lease rates are ridiculously high.
We also gotta think about the solution that is possible, not the ideal... And there is also the "chicken and the egg" conundrum here, and specifically in the case of Edmonton, it has 3 players: online shopping, suburban malls and street retail...
We want people to buy from the latter, but right now, even if we managed to get people to stop buying from Amazon and the likes, they'll still flock to suburban malls, because that's all there is (and it will continue to be like this unless there's come sort of incentive to open somewhere else)
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I agree. Admittedly I don't know much about downtown lease rates and what's involved with CRUs, but certainly individual home owners have lost due to the devaluation of their condos, too, and they have also have seen a decay in the number and types of businesses that can afford to operate downtown. It just seems something's gotta give and I'd like it to be much more competitive lease rates on the CRUs to support a growing core population and increased vibrancy and quality of life downtown. I mean so many spaces are sitting empty for so long - I'd like to see some aggressiveness to build things back up - this doesn't apply to all CRU owners.
 
_urbanite said:
That condo, with those apartment rental grade finishings and horrible layout, isn't even worth the 228k they're asking for now IMO. High condo fees too. Hard pass
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It originally was 265k and likely closer to 340-360k just a few years back.

Go on MLS... there are dozens and dozens of decent units that were 320-420k under 250k now...
 
I wonder how much revenue the city has lost due to the devaluation of just downtown/Oliver condos. Property taxes would have dropped significantly or at least not increased anywhere near the levels of other communities.
 
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