Office and Industrial Property Cycles and Sub-market Emergence in Three Canadian Cities

The context to this research is office and industrial property market cycles in three Canadian cities - Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Each of the three cities has a distinct economic base and, as a result, has significantly different commercial property construction cycles. The variations in the primary office and industrial user groups shape these markets and affect investment cycles. The three cities are shown to be rarely in the same phase of a development/investment cycle. The paper examines the implications for the structure of their property stock and the operation of individual city markets. The key focus is on the role of property market cycles in the emergence and changes in office sub-markets. The analysis encompasses annual office building construction cycles in each market on a building-by-building basis over the past 100 years. The analysis is based on traditional multiple regression models and compared to the output of a machine learning model. The results are considered in the context of local and regional policy implications.