COVID-19 has intensified pressure to support physical, social and emotional well-being within the built environment, but many investors, owners and managers were already embracing healthy building principles ahead of pandemic-triggered challenges.

Reflecting on a year in which the pandemic unsettled market fundamentals to the east and to the west, Calgary-based analysts focus more on tangential circumstances than the COVID-19 outbreak itself.

An influx of new office supply was always expected to shake up the status quo in the downtown Toronto market given that approximately two-thirds of the 8+ million square feet of space currently under construction is already preleased.

Canadian commercial real estate assets are comparatively less exposed to the dire physical threats that extreme weather poses or has already served up in other global regions.

Women were jettisoned from 14,300 of the roughly 16,000 positions Ontario's real estate, rental and leasing sector shed last year.

A ten-year run of capital growth abruptly reversed, resulting in a 7.8 per cent loss of value across the 2,356 assets that the 44 portfolios represented in the Canada Annual Property Index hold.

Newly released 2020 investment results find industrial and multifamily assets on the positive side of the national average total return for 2,356 directly held standing assets, which registered -4.1 per cent.

Four solutions for a smarter, safer, and cleaner building as cleaning and maintenance is reinvented.

Manulife Investment Management is the first Canadian real estate landlord to achieve GBAC STAR accreditation, for 7 of its Montreal properties.

A new slate of conservation and demand management (CDM) programs allocates $456 million for commercial, institutional and industrial consumers over the four-year period from 2021-24.

Commercial real estate investors, owners and managers are acknowledging that entrenched social inequities undermine their workforces, their tenants and the value of their portfolios.

For now, residential and small business customers enrolled for either time-of-use (TOU) rates or tiered pricing under the provincial regulated price plan will be charged the off-peak TOU rate of 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for all electricity consumption.

Resident British Columbians own about 30 per cent of the properties subject to the speculation and vacancy tax, but account for just 6.6 per cent of collected revenue.

Industrial availability tightened from the third quarter in eight of the 11 surveyed markets, ending the year at well below 2 per cent in Vancouver and Montreal and below 1 per cent in Toronto.

Although they increasingly rely on professional service providers to keep up with the complexities of compliance, owners/managers ultimately carry the responsibility for life safety and bear the brunt of enforcement.

The commercial real estate, facilities management and construction/retrofit sectors appear poised to capture a share of the spending announced in the Canadian government’s fall economic statement.

Multifamily and industrial properties are routinely lumped together as favoured investment assets, but asset managers face divergent degrees of difficulty when they seek to mine value from energy performance.