This week’s valuation of 400 West Georgia Street at $395 million as Allied Properties REIT boosts its stake in the distinctive 24-storey office tower by Westbank Projects Corp. is the first in a string of deals that gives insight into the worth of the city’s office market following the pandemic.
Office deals, by contrast, totalled $512 million. The few that take place were largely closings at Bosa Waterfront Centre, which broke pricing records the project presold Nov. 3-5, 2017. Those deals continued to set benchmarks when the deals closed last year. “It sets that high watermark, that new high threshold for price per square foot for strata office,” Thompson said. “The high interest rate environment has stalled out a lot of purchase activity, so these were quite significant in the market because there were so few other deals in the marketplace.”
On a national basis, the decline in transaction activity in Vancouver was multiples of what was seen in Calgary and Edmonton, the two other markets Colliers surveyed in Western Canada. Calgary saw sales decline eight per cent, while sales in Edmonton declined five per cent.