Calgary Office — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

Five brokerages published Calgary office data for the first quarter of 2026 — Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers, Avison Young, CBRE and JLL — across seven city reports, with Colliers and CBRE each splitting their downtown and suburban coverage into separate publications. They describe the same shape: a downtown core still working through the space released by energy-sector mergers, and a suburban market that several of the firms characterize as their strongest in years.

Downtown net absorption was negative at four of the five firms, the lone exception being Avison Young's modestly positive reading. CBRE called it the downtown's fifth consecutive quarter of negative net absorption; Avison Young described negative absorption in four of the last five quarters. The suburbs ran the other way: every firm that reports a suburban figure recorded positive absorption, led by CBRE's 424,000 square feet — which CBRE said exceeded all of 2025 and was the submarket's strongest quarter since Q4 2018. CBRE measured the resulting gap between suburban and downtown vacancy at 1,290 basis points, which it called the largest it has recorded in Calgary.

Headline market-wide vacancy clustered in the low-to-mid 20-percent range — Cushman & Wakefield at 21.2 percent, Avison Young at 22.8 percent, JLL at 25.3 percent — while downtown-only readings ran from 26.0 percent to 29.9 percent. Net asking rents were broadly flat at roughly 16 to 18 dollars per square foot, with the firms noting upward pressure only at the top of the market. On the investment side, Calgary continued to carry the highest downtown office cap rate of any major Canadian market in CBRE's national survey.

This report relays what the five brokerages reported for the quarter, alongside the national capital-markets context their parent surveys provide. It is descriptive: where the firms disagree on a number or its direction, the disagreement is surfaced rather than resolved.