Office Development Opportunities Limited

Brookfield Office Properties president and CEO Jan Sucharda was about to embark on a stairway office climb up 72 storeys to help raise funds for the United Way, yet in between stretches talked to us about the downtown Vancouver office scene.

The company currently owns and operates the Class-A, 853k SF Royal Centre on West Georgia. Vancouver is currently going through a construction boom in its downtown (the cranes aren't flying south for winter this year), with a second wave on the way after 2016 with buildings from developers like Morguard and GWL Realty Advisers.

A trend for office towers like the one proposed by Morguard for West Hastings (image) is more boutique style, with smaller floor plates. The average floorplate size on projects going up now like Telus Garden (22k SF) and 745 Thurlow (16k SF) are larger. "Vancouver is a resource-based and Pacific Rim-oriented type of market," Jan says. "You won't see the larger sizes to the same degree that you would in Toronto and Calgary."

The average-sized office space, from Jan's vantage point, is 5,000 SF, so the smaller-floor player offering should work well. Brookfield just broke ground on the first phase of the Brookfield Place Calgary development project (above)—1.4M SF in the first phase, at 56 storeys, making it the tallest building in Western Canada (the average floor is over 26k SF). "Vancouver is a tough market to grow into now," Jan says. "We'd love to grow there, but it's not huge in terms of size. Opportunities are limited. We would like to expand if given the opportunity." (We could always do a hostile takeover of Winnepeg.) Brookfield owns, develops, and manages office properties in the US, Australia, and the UK as well.