Movement, yes, sign of ground being broken, no. The drop in commodities is hitting us hard now. My hopes for an office boom have been dashed in the last quarter or two.
How so? The only industry feeling the pinch in Toronto is financial services - and even then, they're still doing well.

Technology and other companies are growing rapidly. There is still demand for large scale office development.
 
Financial services is doing so so overall and they are the ones that usually anchor these towers. Tech, legal services, exploration, etc. fill in the rest.
 
So I think they key to judge new office construction is to see 1) How much space is available in new builds about to come to the market 2) How much backfill is available.

Here's what I find interesting; A lot of older buildings that seemed to have a lot of inventory due to tenants moving into newer spaces seemed to have filled up pretty well; But ... a new wave is occuring now, Ok maybe they'll have similar luck, but the one difference, some of the new builds aren't quite as full ... take BA East ... I think it still has a good 30/40% of the space left for lease even though its just about done ... all the buildings that have finished up to this point come up about 80-100% full, so not sure if that's a sign of anything .. time will tell !
 
You know maybe I take the comment above back; I just looked at BA East but taking a look at all the other offices (Sun Life / Oxford/ King East / Peter / ...) most of the others are nearly fully leased already;
 
From what i see, the majors aren't exactly expanding so it boils down to expiring leases and spaces that need a refresh. Afterall, so much easier to move to new digs than to renovate existing ones.
 
Yep, well TD was on the block for a large amount of space at some point not sure what panned out with that (one for the short term and another longer term) they moved into RBC's Front street gig, partly I think so not sure if that's all.
 
For anyone thinking that this building proposal has gone completely dormant, things are happening behind the scenes. Work on the drawings for the building resulted in a number of issues where what was to be built did not fit in closely enough with the Site Plan Approval it had been granted, so new documents have been submitted to apply for a new Site Plan Approval.

It is the 46-storey version moving forward, not the original 54-storey plan which had the building at 265 metres high. We have a couple new renderings, each with a close-up as well. You'll find them in the first position of the dataBase file (linked at the top of the page) which you can compare with the original in position two, then two more in the next two positions showing public realm along Front Street. The fourth new image is a crop of the first, and it is found buried later in the file where it can be compared with crops of the original 54-storey version.

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CF's website still lists 16 York as the only active development. It even has it's own site. 160 Front is still not mentioned. It looks like they are leasing out 16 York first, unless they have an anchor tenant who preferred 160 Front that we don't know about.

(from the render it looks like the floor plate is a bit bigger. The data base indicates 1.45 million sf. That's a lot. It must have a hefty floor plate.)
 
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The site is now zoned for a 126,570 square metre building (and 265 metres high), but the 46-storey version is only 118,328 square metres in size, or a 7% reduction.

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they are in the project data files at the top of the page.

For the lazy...

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The previous proposal is on the left.




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