Downtown Vancouver office vacancy rises as older buildings sit empty | Daily Hive

Downtown Vancouver's Central Business District. (Oleg Zhyvotkov/Shutterstock)

There was a further uptick in the vacancy rate for leased office space in the downtown Vancouver peninsula at the end of 2025.

According to a market update report today by commercial real estate firm CBRE, downtown Vancouver’s office vacancy rate reached 12.8 per cent — the highest not only since the pandemic, but also in more than two decades since the early 2000s after the dot-com bubble, which sent the vacancy rate to nearly 14 per cent. This vacancy rate in the fourth quarter of 2025 is an increase of 0.2 per cent compared to the third quarter.

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Prior to the pandemic, in early 2020, the vacancy rate for downtown Vancouver hovered at about two per cent, which propelled the pre-pandemic office construction boom that ended with the final major office project completions of Bosa Waterfront Centre, The Post, B6, and The Stack between 2022 and 2023.

According to CBRE’s report today, a large volume of premium Class AAA listings — such as space in some of the recently-completed projects — continues to reshape supply availability in Vancouver’s city centre. Tenant consolidation and downsizing has increased the vacancy rate in Class AAA spaces by 1.5 per cent compared to the start of 2025. All the while, Class AAA spaces remain the office typology with the lowest vacancy rate.

Within the lower-tier office space classes, which are typically older and with fewer amenities, there continues to be much higher vacancies, with Class B and Class C spaces seeing their vacancy rate increase by three per cent over the course of 2025 to 17.8 per cent. This is well above the 9.3 per cent vacancy rate for Class AAA and Class A spaces, with a slight decrease of 0.1 per cent year-over-year. There was previously a highly apparent “flight to quality,” with tenants in older spaces moving to the newly-built buildings.

With all that said, downtown Vancouver’s overall office vacancy rate continues to be the lowest among Canada’s major city centres, followed by downtown Halifax at 14.5 per cent, and the downtowns of Toronto and Ottawa — each at 15.9 per cent. The city centres of Calgary, Waterloo, and London have the highest vacancy rates — 30.4 per cent, 31.1 per cent, and 31.5 per cent, respectively.

A growing number of companies are reversing some pandemic-era workplace policies, requiring staff to return to the office more days per week or even full time. This has helped moderate some increases in vacancy rates, which are measured by whether space is leased — not by how it is used or whether it is actively occupied.

As for Metro Vancouver’s suburban market — defined as areas outside the downtown Vancouver peninsula — the leased office space vacancy rate reached 10.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2025, representing an increase of 0.1 per cent compared to the third quarter. This is a lower suburban vacancy rate than what was experienced in 2024, lower than the rate of 13 per cent to 14 per cent in 2016 to 2017, and lower than the rate of about 23 per cent in 2004.

Across the entire region, about 595,000 sq. ft. of office space is currently under construction, including over 29,000 sq. ft. of space in downtown Vancouver — represented solely by Reliance Properties’ new heritage office project at 837 Beatty St. next to BC Place Stadium, which will reach completion in 2026 — and 565,000 sq. ft. in the suburban areas, with 58 per cent pre-leased.

With Metro Vancouver’s leased industrial space market, the leased vacancy rate reached six per cent in the fourth quarter of 2025, representing a 0.7 per cent increase compared to the third quarter. CBRE notes that this is mainly due to increased listing activity for properties between 50,000 sq. ft. and 100,000 sq. ft. north of the Fraser River, where the vacancy rate has increased by 1.4 per cent to 5.6 per cent. However, there has been no change in the vacancy rate for industrial properties south of the Fraser River, with the rate remaining at 6.5 per cent.

In 2025, the region saw nearly 4.3 million sq. ft. of new industrial space completions, with nearly half of this inventory built-to-suit, which indicates a significant slowdown in speculative industrial development. As well, the development pipeline is narrowing, with only two million sq. ft. expected to reach completion in 2026, with 1.3 million sq. ft. deemed to be speculative.

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