ScotiaBank building on Second Avenue to host 10,000-square-foot space due to open in November.
In the 35 years since he started working in Saskatoon’s real estate business, Jamie Lackie’s learned the value of patience.
“It ebbs and flows,” he says, sitting down in what used to be the Canpotex offices in the ScotiaBank building on Second Avenue in downtown Saskatoon.
Lackie has spent the last few years of his career as an asset manager for Pillar Properties Corp., which owns the building. The floor above where he sits is in the process of renovations to host a new Regus co-working space, set to open in November with some 40 private offices, meeting rooms and other amenities spread over about 10,000 square feet.
Lackie says he expects to see more tenants like Regus bring different business models to downtown Saskatoon, as the city’s real estate market works through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That’s the story of real estate. It happens; the new shiny thing comes along, people want to go to that,” he says.
While he thinks it may still take a year or two for things to settle, Lackie says he believes the vacant space downtown will get snapped up, just as he’s seen happen in previous boom-and-bust cycles in Saskatoon.
“We have a lot going for us in Saskatoon. We’ve got some challenges downtown, but there’s some creative ideas and some good people involved trying to find solutions.”
Wayne Berger, CEO of the Americas for Regus parent company International Workplace Group, says the shift away from traditional office arrangements was already underway before COVID-19, fuelled by something people seek to avoid even more than a potentially deadly virus: lengthy commutes. He says this has held true regardless of market size; people in small cities hate the drive to work just as much as those in larger centres.
“Whether your commute is 30 minutes in heavy traffic or 90 minutes in heavy traffic, it’s still unproductive time,” he says.
Berger says IWG has found that the pandemic has made more employers more selective about when they haul workers into the office.
“It’s now really about coming back into an office when there’s a real need to gather,” he says.
Berger says IWG has been eyeing Saskatoon as a potential market for years, and the recent resource boom made it an opportune time to set up shop.
“It’s a very interesting, economically diverse city. You have a great university, economic diversity, and then you have some significant sectors, like potash, that continues to grow in demand,” he says, adding this appears to be attracting more professionals to the city, many of whom are likely to want a place to work a few days a week away from home, and opportunities to network.
“There’s also this interesting dynamic in this close-knit business community that drives a need for more incubation.”
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