Toronto 160 Front West | 239.87m | 46s | Cadillac Fairview | AS + GG

[CITY_LOVER]

I would not get to excited, there is no guarantee that this will get aproved anywhere over 160 meters

Oh no! So the height restrictions would likely be in force here too...it's disappointing to know that height restrictions can be in effect so close to the financial district. What is the purpose of having a height restriction in that area (front & simcoe-ish)? what are they trying to protect? i hope it's not just for the 'tapering policy'?

 

[travis3000]

I wouldn't worry about height restrictions here. The city would be stupid to force a brand new office tower down in height. It's quite clear CF is designing this one directly for the client and why would city council potentially ruin commercial development in the city when most of them are encouraging new office buildings here. I have a feeling this one will go no problem and it will end up being over 250m in height.

 

[travis3000]

OMG, this is so sexciting! I just did an electrifying happy dance that one would normally only see during gay pride week in Gayonto! Can't wait! I'm really hoping this tower's overall size will outdo Calgary's Bow tower.

If insiders are correct, not only will it outdo Calgary's Bow in height but it will also exceed the newly announced Herald Square in Calgary (810ft), which would give Toronto the tallest proposed office building in the country. Let's hope city council makes an exception for their height limit.

 

[Ramako]

I would not get to excited, there is no guarantee that this will get aproved anywhere over 160 meters

The Ritz is to the west of this lot and is over 200 metres. They'll get more than that here, no question.

 

[canarob]

Also, I'm sure the city would be more keen on a 260m office building than another condo, especially given how Southcore was initially intended to be mostly office. There's not as much room left for monster office buildings as there used to be.

 

[fedplanner]

I wouldn't worry about height restrictions here. The city would be stupid to force a brand new office tower down in height. It's quite clear CF is designing this one directly for the client and why would city council potentially ruin commercial development in the city when most of them are encouraging new office buildings here. I have a feeling this one will go no problem and it will end up being over 250m in height.

I agree- the current height limit set in zoning is 76 metres... I believe the lands also included in the tall building guidelines with recommendations up to 106m. Lastly, 160m is an arbitrary number that's been thrown around as a height limit in this area. The system is broken folks.

Thankfully, even if the planning department recommends refusal based on current planning documents, I can easily see city council overturning the recommendation and allowing the office tower.

 

[TonyV]

^ I can absolutely see City Council approving height, honest to goodness height, in this locale. Don't worry about it folks.

It's a good site for height.

 

[Atlantis]

Isn't this property part of the CBD area that the city identified as potentially having unlimited height based on the tall buildings guidelines? I thought I read something in there about there being no vision for height limitations in the CBD itself. Can someone clarify that if they've seen the guidelines recently or remembers the specifics of what's in them?

 

[innsertnamehere]

no, the unlimited height guidelines are essentially useless as they only cover the area already occupied by the big 5 bank office towers, around king and bay. any developable (I.E. not already occupied by a million+ square foot office building) land in the city has some sort of height limit on it. mind you the RBC building across the street from this sits on land zoned for 76m IIRC, so the limits really don't do crap in reality.

 

[Platform 27]

I remember Leftcoaster mentioning a few months ago that they were redesigning the site specifically for a large international resource company. I guess they might be moving ahead with it then...

Hmm, XStrata..? Barrick..? Maybe even an oil and gas giant? Whatever happened to the Sunlife Tower rumours? Wasn't that based on this site?

So these rumours are true.

Someone needs to figure out what tenant this could be... Hints are a few pages back.

Forgive me for boring everyone with this, but I'm always game for another round of "guess-the-anchor-tenant".

If it's a true multinational, then guessing becomes a total crapshoot. But if we're talking about the kind of 600-pound gorilla that would need 600K square feet of office and we want to restrict ourselves to Canadian companies, a decent enough place to start looking would be the country's 30 largest corporations by market cap. (Granted, it's not a perfect proxy for how much floorspace they'd occupy, or how important downtown space versus a suburban campus would be, but it's a starting point.)

1	Royal Bank of Canada		$76.4B
2	Toronto-Dominion Bank		$71.3B
3	Bank of Nova Scotia		$57.9B
4	Suncor Energy			$43.1B
5	Harvest Operations		$39.0B
6	Canadian National Railway	$38.0B
7	Barrick Gold			$35.7B
8	Bank of Montreal		$35.7B
9	Imperial Oil			$35.6B
10	PotashCorp			$34.3B
11	Cdn. Natural Resources		$32.2B
12	BCE				$31.7B
13	Enbridge			$31.3B
14	TransCanada Corp.		$30.1B
15	CIBC				$28.8B
16	Goldcorp			$26.9B
17	Thomson Reuters			$24.1B
18	Cenovus Energy			$23.9B
19	Husky Energy			$22.2B
20	Great-West Lifeco		$20.9B
21	Manulife Financial		$20.3B
22	Brookfield			$19.7B
23	Telus				$19.6B
24	Power Financial			$19.1B
25	Rogers				$18.8B
26	Teck Resources			$18.5B
27	Valeant Pharmaceuticals		$15.2B
28	EnCana				$14.9B
29	Sun Life Financial		$12.9B
30	Canadian Pacific Railway	$12.9B

A couple of the speculated names from throughout the thread do indeed crop up (Thomson Reuters, Sun Life...). Now, I don't know how credible the "natural resource" hint is, but working from that we get to cut down to 13:

4	Suncor Energy			$43.1B
5	Harvest Operations		$39.0B
7	Barrick Gold			$35.7B
9	Imperial Oil			$35.6B
10	PotashCorp			$34.3B
11	Cdn. Natural Resources		$32.2B
13	Enbridge			$31.3B
14	TransCanada Corp.		$30.1B
16	Goldcorp			$26.9B
18	Cenovus Energy			$23.9B
19	Husky Energy			$22.2B
26	Teck Resources			$18.5B
28	EnCana				$14.9B

Of these, the nine big oil and gas players (Suncor, Harvest, Imperial, Cdn Natural, Enbridge, TransCanada, Cenovus, Husky and EnCana) should probably be counted out. All nine are headquartered in Calgary, their Toronto office footprint is currently pretty minimal, and I see little reason for that to change. That leaves us with:

7	Barrick Gold			$35.7B
10	PotashCorp			$34.3B
16	Goldcorp			$26.9B
26	Teck Resources			$18.5B

I think you can drop PotashCorp from further consideration -- they only way they'd be in play is if they were picking up their entire headquarters from Saskatoon and dropping it in Toronto, which would offer minimal benefits and would be a political non-starter with the Saskatchewan government.

The remaining three are global mining interests, one headquartered in Toronto (Barrick at Brookfield Place), one headquartered in Vancouver with a Toronto satellite office (Goldcorp at Richmond-Adelaide Centre), and one headquartered in Vancouver with no listed Toronto corporate address (Teck).

Needlessly-detailed Googling has turned up that Goldcorp had historically been headquartered in Toronto for much of its history but moved its HQ to Wheaton River Minerals's space in Vancouver back when they acquired them in 2004. As far as I can tell, there's no real geographic impetus for them to stay in Vancouver (they even have mines in Ontario but not BC), and although you mightn't know it, the case could be made that Toronto has basically emerged in recent years as the global nexus of the entire gold-mining sector.

That said, gold mining firms are probably more compact than average in terms of their office footprint per million dollars of value, so I don't honestly know if a Barrick or a Goldcorp would be space-hungry enough to occupy enough floors on their own that they'd tip the the balance towards CF getting a 60+ story behemoth moving.

Looking outside of Canada, some of the biggest mining interests that might be in the market for a regional office would be...

• BHP Billiton (has some diamond mines in the north but no major corporate presence in Canada)
• Vale (parent of Inco, existing offices in Toronto at Royal Bank Plaza)
• Rio Tinto (parent of Alcan, existing offices in Montreal)
• Xstrata (has some nickel/copper/zinc mines in N. Ont, existing offices in Toronto at FCP)

So yeah, there's a few names to chew on.

What I find interesting is that in the last year we've begun to edge away from the going assumption that most office buildings moving forward would be firmly in the 500-800k square foot, 25-35 storey range -- the likes of Telus, PwC, Bremner, 1 York, Waterpark III etc. I can recall reading no shortage of analysis that said various iron laws of the market in terms of cost-effectiveness and developer risk-aversion locked in buildings in this size range. So what's changed so that we're now in a world where the office towers that are whispered about are considerably bigger (this project, Oxford Place, office elements of 1 Yonge, and the neverending 45 Bay dance...). A new willingness to build on spec? Bubbley overconfidence?

 

[innsertnamehere]

Each Oxford place building is around 1,000,000 square feet, Richmond Adelaide centre is 900,000, and BAC2 is 1,000,000. I'd say that we are increasingly seeing the standard being around 800,000-1,000,000 square feet, rather than 500-800k. As for this and 45 bay, I feel it is just aiming at huge tenants, and scaling their buildings proportionately. Most of the 500-800k size office buildings are aiming for the 300,000ish square foot tenants, while a building like this which will likely be around 1,500,000 aims at the larger tenants, which are much, much rarer in this city than the 300,000 square foot tenants that have anchored the last 8 buildings to go up. While in the current economic conditions it seems like a 300k tenant secures a lease once or twice a year, the 600k tenants sign once every 2 decades.. The last huge office building was scotia plaza which began its development in the mid 1980's.

 

[Platform 27]

^I guess my point is that even as vacancy rates for office space drop and demand grows, the bottom-line count of the number of potential tenants out there that can commit to 600k square feet (and prompt a developer to float another 900k square feet on the market, for a total building of 1.5 million sq feet) really hasn't.

Toronto's historical experience has been that we haven't generally seen big buildings proposed in the hopes that space will lease out, half-floor by half-floor, to a variety of law firms and investment brokerages. Our big office towers get built because a single anchor tenant commits to a large proportion of the space and the project owner feels comfortable forging ahead in the knowledge that they'll get the remainder leased to smaller fish at a good enough rate soon enough. (Granted, that's just the Toronto experience, and in New York you saw both World Trade Centers and the Empire State Building go up with a much more dispersed occupancy model and without one huge tenant committing to 40% of the space.)

The Big 5 banks already have their logos glowing on the top of the skyline and seem to be in the market for Waterpark III-sized supplements rather than FCP-sized beasts. Big 4 accounting (KPMG, E&Y, PwC and Deloitte) have also made their moves in the last few years, and when Menkes/Oxford/Brookfield took them in as anchor tenants, double-checked how much additional space they felt the market would absorb, and pressed the green button to commit each project, the tallest result was BAC1 at 51 storeys. We can muse about the day Desjardins or Manulife make a play for a flashy Bay Street presence, I guess, or wonder if a CIBC or Scotia might trade their current digs for a new tower at some point, but that doesn't change the reality is that there's a finite well of big tenants in Toronto.

Anyway, back to 156 Front... One thing I didn't mention in my previous post is that if all the breathing-into-paper-bag international starchitect rumours are true, then it's much more likely to be the headquarters for a firm that wants to spend a bit more to make a statement than just branch office #8 of a Frankfurt-headquartered multinational. It's also more likely to be a firm with an established and sizeable presence in the city rather than one with a fingers-crossed expansion mindset. To my mind, that puts Barrick as the odds-on favourite.

 

[taal]

Barrick ? Doubt it ... most mining firms are in huge cost cut mode.

Until I see something on paper I'm not holding my breath.

There is a lot of office construction in the core at the moment and even some large scale projects outside of the core (which has been unheard of in the last 20 years or so ... think QWC ( ~ 300K ) and King East Center ( ~ 500K ).

Ignoring the oxford towers ... there is absolutely nothing going on there ! I'm not saying they won't happen in time, but they will not be built from the get go even if the casino gets approved (and lets be honest folks ... the odds of a casino in Toronto are next to none at this point).

Anyway a run down of all the space that will be available in the next 5 years or so.
Construction started:
RBC Water Park Place (~ 350L still available)
Bremner Tower (~ 300K still available)
BAE (~ 450K still available)
100 Adelaide ( ~600K still available )
King West Center (~400K ... assuming great gulf takes some space )
QWC ( ~250K still available )
18 York (~700K still available ... yes just about the whole building )

So that's about 3 million square feet of unclaimed space.

Solid Proposals:
16 York (800K)
?


Are there really any other solid proposals at the time ?


The office space market in Toronto (and Canada in general) is dominated by a few landlords ... actually this is why you don't see the vacany rates in Canada that you do in the states i.e. 15-20% is pretty typical in the states, where under 10% ... yes the market has been more active here but that's not the only factor).


The only reason I can see this going ahead are:
1) Some weird one off tenant (hard to imagine) ... most Canadian companies are very consvertaive, look where the major accounting / and bank in Canada chose to move a lot of their employees (i.e. RBC place / BA West). Do you really think a company wants iconic space ? Enca was one of those strange exceptions.

2) Cadalic Farview wants to get their feet wet ! Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think any of the current proposals / construction are by them ?

 

[innsertnamehere]

This one is Cadillac fairview.

 

[taal]

This one is Cadillac fairview.

Yep I know, I was wondering if they have any other proposals on the go ? Don't believe so.