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BCBUSINESS.CA NOVEMBER 2017 BCBUSINESS 67 up a vacant art deco landmark on Market Street, the city's dis- tressed main drag. Twitter's move wasn't an unmitigated success; beset by earnings misses, the company is report- edly subletting 30 per cent of its space. But other tech com- panies, large and small, fol- lowed its geographical lead. Whereas the •rst tech •rms to venture downtown came for character properties around the fringes with their bare brick walls and timber beams overhead, today's downtown nouveau riche favour custom- built or -renovated AAA space. In Vancouver, IT •rms have engaged in a kind of turf war, each looking for that iconic space and location that will appeal most to talented young hires. "I don't think there's a space like this in Vancouver," boasts Edoardo De Martin, director of the Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre above the Nordstrom store. He cites the things mil- lennial employees appreciate: good transit access, city amenities and, within the space, an open, col- laborative environment where they're not chained to a desk. "This space is more amenable to the demo- graphic we're hiring," De Martin says. When SAP Labs Vancouver (which was founded as Crystal Services and has gone through a series of owners including Seagate Software, Crystal Decisions and Business Objects) set up shop down- town in the 1980s, it was an anomaly in IT, recalls managing director Kirsten Sutton. But even then the location "was a huge attractor of talent," she says. It just made life simpler for young programmers who already gravitated to apartment living in the city. Many of those early hires now have families and live in the suburbs, Sutton says, but even for them the company's Yaletown site is accessible by transit at all hours. As for more recent hires from the millen- nial generation, the central location is pretty much expected. Only 16 per cent of employees at SAP Labs drive to work. Many, especially the younger ones, don't own a car at all. SAP just renovated the space over the past two years and signed a new 10-year lease. Instead of building a cafeteria, as the German multinational has done at most of its other ošces around the world, SAP Labs Vancouver runs a program called Lunch on Us whereby employees receive a gift card they can use at any of 52 restaurants in the sur- rounding neighbourhood. "When a new restaurant opens in Yaletown, right away they are knocking on our door wanting to be on that card," Sutton says. Among the most recent generation of IT startups, a suburban location was seldom even considered. "We looked here and in Gastown for places, prob- ably because it's just a little more interesting," says Stewart Butter•eld while showing oŸ the Yaletown ošce of messaging app maker Slack, a company he founded jointly in San Francisco and Vancouver in 2014. It's easy to meet people from other companies and visitors from out of town in a central location, he explains, and most of the 100 or so Vancou- ver employees (none of whom appears to be over 40) live in the city proper. Immigrants and other recruits from out of town gravitate to the centre of things. But it makes sense for suburbanites, too. "If you live in Burnaby, having an ošce in Burnaby is super nice," Butter•eld says. "But if you live in Richmond, having an ošce in Burnaby is a pain." Tech's growing clout It's possible at least some of the current demand for urban ošce space re¤ects the cyclical high the technolo¥y industry is experiencing after a decade of underinvestment following the dot-com bust. Also, the exchange rate may be contributing to tech sector demand in Canadian cities, says Colliers vice- president Matt Carlson, who chairs the company's national technolo¥y practice. Whether domestic or multinational, most IT •rms earn revenue in U.S. CITY CENTRE Microsoft Canada's 142,000- square-foot facility in Vancouver can accommodate 700 software developers SAP Labs Vancouver runs a program called Lunch on Us whereby employ- ees receive a gift card they can use at any of 52 restaurants in the surrounding neighbourhood

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