With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1406705
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 41 ADAM BLASBERG shift might be. At the moment, downtown vacancy rates are up slightly, but most noticeably in older, Class C buildings. In April of last year, many were predicting that companies would cut their office space in half. Now, says Wong from Altus, it looks more like it will be around 10 to 15 percent. Meanwhile, developers keep planning new office towers in Vancouver. At Bentall- GreenOak, the giant real estate company that owns 24 office and mall properties just in B.C., along with managing others, gloom isn't on the agenda. "With downtown, we're pretty optimistic about a snapback," says Phil Stone, head of the company's research division. Even after a year-and-a- half of pandemic, he notes, Vancouver still has the lowest vacancy rate of the 30 largest downtowns in Canada and the U.S. However, even the most relentlessly cheery from the "offices are going to come back" cohort say there will be changes. Wong predicts a different dynamic. Ten- ants will want shorter leases (three to five years instead of seven to 15). They'll use short-term offices for temporary bulges in employee traffic or special projects. "They need that flex to shrink or expand," Wong says. "Coworking spaces are kind of ideal." Everyone is talking about a hybrid work system—some days at home, some in the office. But hybrid means a different thing to each person and each company. Each choice means a potential different outcome for real estate. S C E N A R I O 1 : Some companies are giv- ing up all long-term offices and never going back. Like Dallas Fontaine. He had seven employees at a Gastown coworking space for his company, The Perk Services, which devises reward systems for employees working remotely. In March, everyone in his company was sent home, and they scattered —to Victoria, to Rossland, to Burnaby. (Three were downsized.) Fontaine tried working at home in Langley. With three young children, the 29-year-old dad found that things didn't go so well: "If you have kids, you can't think." Fontaine started renting an office five minutes away from his Willoughby house in a commercial building on 200th Avenue. It provided him with equipment, quiet and a group of adults to connect with occasionally. Now his plan is to keep rent- ing that space from Regus, a division of the world's largest flex-office company—in the