Amazon moves to central Toronto
Company joins Apple, Cisco, BCE in south core — or SoCo — district
Amazon.com Inc. is moving into one of Toronto’s newest skyscrapers, taking enough office space for 800 employees, as Canada’s largest city lures big technology firms.
The company will occupy five floors near the top of 120 Bremner Blvd., a 31-storey glass tower south of the financial core that opened last year, according to brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. Amazon will move in September to the 127,000-square-foot space from a low-rise office in the city’s west end, where it housed software developers, engineers and programmers, according to the broker who represented Amazon.
“As tech companies mature, their needs change and they need more space, better-quality air, betterquality power supply,” Eamonn Murphy, a vice-president at Jones Lang LaSalle, said in a recent interview.
The world’s largest Internet retailer joins Cisco Systems Inc., BCE Inc. and Apple Inc. in migrating to Toronto’s south core, or SoCo, district. The Bremner tower is one of at least four new office buildings opening by 2016 in the area as developers hunt for land south of the traditional financial district.
Craig Berman, a spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment on the Toronto lease.
There are about 100 job postings for developers, engineers and salespeople for the Greater Toronto Area on Amazon’s website. The city houses about a third of Canada’s information-technology firms, according to the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance.
Amazon also operates on Canada’s West Coast. The company last year signed a lease for as much as 156,000 square feet in downtown Vancouver, enough space for 1,000 employees, moving from a smaller location.
In the U.S., it’s becoming more difficult for technology companies to add the number of people needed to match business growth because of caps on foreign workers. Canada doesn’t have a limit for the hiring of highly-skilled foreign employees.
Amazon’s new Toronto location, six floors above Apple’s offices, has access to the Path system, an underground walkway that is the largest subterranean shopping complex in the world and connects to the city’s subway.