As 1st office-to-hotel conversion opens in downtown Calgary, what's next for revival bid?
CBC
On Thursday, a former office tower in Calgary's downtown reopened as the Element Calgary Downtown hotel, marking the city's first completed office-to-hotel conversion under its downtown office conversion program.
For officials who have spent years plotting the program, it's not just about the hotel, which sports 226 rooms, along with a rooftop bar.
More than that, officials say it represents an important step on a long journey to diversify the downtown, providing more things for people to do in the core than just go to work.
"For us, it's pretty exciting," said Thom Mahler, the director of the city's downtown strategy, in an interview.
"If you remember going back to 2014, 2015, a lot of stuff we talked about then at that time was how our downtown was heavily reliant on one industry, very focused on head office and office space."
It's a notable moment in the ongoing plan to reinvent Calgary's hollowed-out downtown core.
But there's still a long road ahead, as many approved projects remain unfinished and vacancy rates remain high.
Still, for Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek, it's the sort of project she feels the city should have acted quickly on when the energy sector was in dire straights 10 years ago.
"It took us a lot of time, because we had so many cynics who said, you can't do anything but office downtown. And to those cynics, I say, you were wrong," Gondek said. "We proved out that you can do things differently."
Calgary's downtown problem did start in earnest in 2015, after the price of oil crashed.
At that time, an office-leasing principal at Avison Young told Bloomberg News it was a "bloodbath." The COVID-19 pandemic five years later only made things worse.
Today, while the bleeding may have been slowed, recovery remains a work in progress.
Industry figures vary, but as of the first quarter of 2025, about 30.2 per cent of Calgary's downtown office space was vacant, down from a peak of 33.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2022, according to the real estate firm CBRE Canada.
Meanwhile, overall Class AA real estate — sometimes referred to as "trophy buildings" — was around 17 per cent vacant.
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