Edmonton Retail — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

Edmonton's retail market carried low vacancy and cooling rent growth into 2026, with a wave of new supply outrunning demand for the first time in several years. JLL — the only brokerage reporting Edmonton retail fundamentals in this quarter's data set — puts total vacancy at 3.8 percent and average asking rent at 25.47 dollars per square foot. Those two figures are the market's standing levels heading into Q1 2026.

The rest of JLL's headline numbers describe full-year 2025 activity rather than the opening quarter: net absorption of roughly 475,000 square feet, net completions of about 0.9 million square feet, leasing volume down 10 percent to 1.2 million square feet, construction activity down 44 percent, and rent growth decelerating from 5.1 percent in 2024 to 1.7 percent in 2025. Read together, JLL's picture is a fast-growing market digesting a supply wave: deliveries outpaced absorption over the year, lifting vacancy off its 2024 low, while rent growth moderated to what JLL calls a rents-stabilizing stage. Absorption stayed positive across 2025 even after the Hudson's Bay closures, which JLL reads as solid underlying tenant demand.

Because only one brokerage reports Edmonton retail fundamentals here, there is no cross-broker vacancy or rent comparison to draw. The cross-market reference points in this report come from the national cap-rate surveys, where Edmonton appears alongside twelve other Canadian markets.