Even as remote employees start returning to in-person work, Canada’s downtowns remain filled with vacant office buildings. In Calgary, for example, the downtown vacancy rate recently reached 27.5 per cent. Meanwhile, the demand for housing throughout the country is higher than ever. Calgary’s Strategic Group, a company that manages and develops office, retail and apartment properties across the country, has been working toward a solution: office-to-residential conversions.

So far, the company has converted two office buildings to residential units in Edmonton and one in Calgary, creating 2,100 apartments to date—a mix of one– and two–bedroom and studio apartments. The company is now working on its fourth conversion at the Art Nouveau heritage building in Calgary.

We talked to Ken Toews, senior vice-president of development at Strategic Group, about the benefits of office-to-residential conversions and how they can help solve the housing crisis.

When did you first get the idea to transform empty offices into rentals?

A little more than six years ago we saw a problem with office vacancy, and we didn’t think it was going to go away. We had quite a few office buildings in our portfolio, so we thought we had to do something about this before it got worse. I went down to San Francisco and they were doing quite a few conversions at the time. I tried to learn as much there as I could and then came back and we got to work. 

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