Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. still hasn’t decided what to do with more than 220,000 square feet of office space at its main campus on Montreal Road that was vacated during the pandemic, the agency said Friday.
A spokesperson for CMHC confirmed Friday that two of the three buildings at the Crown corporation’s 700 Montreal Rd. headquarters – Building A, which has a total of 165,933 square feet, and Building B, which covers 56,805 square feet – are no longer occupied.
Building C, which is the largest property at about 205,000 square feet, now houses all of the 1,050 CMHC employees who were previously spread across all three office buildings.
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Once Building C was reopened in December 2022 after being shuttered earlier in the COVID-19 crisis, “employees no longer had access to Buildings A and B,” CMHC spokesperson Brie Martin said in an email to OBJ on Friday.
She said the move is part of “an initiative to modernize” the way employees work “by redesigning, consolidating and renovating” the organization’s work sites.
“The workspaces in Building C are not dedicated offices but rather are booked and shared as needed among employees, including executives,” Martin said. “This flexible approach allows us to use the available space more efficiently.”
CMHC owns all three buildings at the Montreal Road campus, which has a total capacity of about 425,000 square feet.
Martin said the housing agency is still “considering how best to align the use of these buildings with CMHC’s mandate and objectives.”
At the same time, a significant chunk of the property is being shopped around to potential tenants.
An online listing from BGIS, the organization that manages more than 21 million square feet of federally owned real estate in the National Capital Region, indicates there is space available for lease in all three buildings at 700 Montreal Rd. – including nearly 140,000 square feet in Building A, 52,600 square feet in Building B and about 41,000 square feet on two empty floors in Building C.
The listing highlights features such as kitchenettes, meeting rooms, on-site daycare, access to amenities such as showers and lounges and “significant views from all sides allowing for an abundance of natural light,” while adding that many of the floors “can come fully furnished or unfurnished.”
A BGIS sales representative told OBJ Friday afternoon the properties were still listed but would not comment on whether any of the space has been leased.
The impact of CMHC’s decision to put Buildings A and B on the market is reflected in the discrepancy between office vacancy rates recently reported by two major brokerage firms.
According to CBRE, the city’s overall office vacancy rate sat at 13.6 per cent at the end of the third quarter, up from 13.5 per cent in June.
CBRE’s stats included about 150,000 square feet of space at the CMHC campus that began appearing on brokerage firms’ radar at the end of August.
However, Colliers did not factor the empty buildings into its calculations – which showed Ottawa’s vacancy rate falling to 12.6 per cent at the end of September from 12.9 per cent in the second quarter.
CMHC’s decision to empty out two of its three office buildings comes amid a seismic shift in the local office market in the wake of COVID-19.
With hybrid work now the norm for many of its employees, the federal government has begun paving the way for a wholesale revamp of its real estate portfolio in the National Capital Region.
Earlier this year, the feds released a list of 10 aging properties they are planning to dispose of in Ottawa.
The “disposal list” includes L’Esplanade Laurier downtown, the Sir Charles Tupper Building on Riverside Drive, and the 1500 Bronson Building and Annex.
