Greater Toronto Office — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

The seven brokerages that publish a Greater Toronto office report broadly characterized the first quarter of 2026 as a turning point — the clearest evidence yet that the downtown market has moved off the bottom of its post-2020 cycle. The recovery they described is real but narrow. It is concentrated downtown, concentrated in Trophy and Class A space, and led by a return-to-office leasing wave from Canada's largest banks. Class B and C buildings, and much of the suburbs, were left behind.

Two features of the quarter make the GTA office market unusually hard to summarize in a single number, and both are addressed directly below. First, the brokers' headline vacancy rates span roughly eight percentage points — from about 10% to over 18% — because they track different universes of buildings, not because they disagree about the direction of travel. Second, their estimates of first-quarter net absorption range from roughly 240,000 square feet to 2.6 million square feet, a near ten-fold spread driven by how each firm treated a single 1.4-million-square-foot tower and by differences in measurement. Where the brokers agreed was on sign and shape: vacancy fell on every firm's books, sublease space kept shrinking, and asking rents for the best downtown space began to rise again after years of stagnation.

No new office buildings were completed across the GTA during the quarter on any broker's count. The development pipeline is dwindling to a single major downtown delivery, with brokers noting that the next wave of new supply is unlikely before 2030 or 2031.