Downtown Canada

[thebasketballgeek]

With the doom and gloom about the state of DT Winnipeg locally one wouldn’t assume so, but in the last decade DT Winnipeg has added roughly 5,000 people going from 15k to 20k residents or a 25% population increase. A lot of the population growth was absorbed by the Exchange District, particularly in conversions of old warehouse buildings to residential lofts. Although we have constructed some new builds most notably 300 Main which is now the tallest building in the city and will probably add close to 1,000 people in the core by itself once fully leased. However, there is plenty of opportunity to add more residential in the CBD because of the embarrassing amount of surface lots directly east of Portage & Main.

We only have done a few office to residential which off the top of my head were 411 Main and Medical Arts Building. There are plans for another one next to P&M (138 Portage E and 146 new units) and next to the Convention Centre. One factor for this is that DT Winnipeg has the third lowest office vacancy rate in Canada at just above 10% so not as many opportunities compared to a city like Calgary.