Technology jobs to the rescue
Vancouver and Toronto among the leaders in rapidly growing sector
TORONTO — A big U.S. real estate firm has acknowledged Canada’s booming technology industry, placing Toronto and Vancouver for the first time among its top cities in North America for job growth in the sector.
The two cities made it on a list CBRE calls its Tech Thirty, an analysis of the Top 30 technology centres in North America that shows how tech workers have kept office markets humming.
“If you look at the tech job growth rate (in Canada) it is well above overall employment. The point is that tech employment is growing substantially faster than overall employment. It’s tech, all tech, now,” said Ross Moore, director of research for CBRE’s operations in Canada. “We’ve got our fingers crossed.”
Moore said Toronto had the fifth-most tech jobs of any city on the Tech 30 list while Vancouver came in at 20.
“It’s the first time we’ve been included,” said Moore, indicating it’s a nod toward the strength of the sector. “When the authors started this year’s report I think it was like, ‘Yeah, we need to include Toronto and Vancouver.’ ”
Some leading companies have settled in the Toronto area, including Facebook Inc., which directly rented 25,000 square feet of space in the first quarter of 2015. Rangle.io Inc. also sublet 29,172 square feet in Toronto’s red-hot technology hub in the downtown west end, during the first quarter of this year.
Toronto is now only behind Washington D.C., Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Boston when it comes to tech jobs, which are described as data processing, software publishers and computer system design.
Vancouver is also having its share of growth with Amazon Inc. recently announcing a deal for 150,000 square feet and Microsoft Inc.’s 143,000-squarefoot space in the downtown core.
CBRE says high-tech is rapidly transforming the officer market across North America. It made up 19 per cent of all leasing activity in 2014, a jump from 14 per cent in 2013. Through the first quarter of 2015, tech had jumped to 20 per cent.
“This sector is projected to remain the strongest source of demand for office space through 2015,” said the report.
The impact is being felt on rental rates, too. The real estate company reports rental rates grew by 10 per cent between the second quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2015, in 16 of its top 30 tech markets.
In Toronto, CBRE said there are now 98,000 people employed in the tech sector, 11.7 per cent of all office employment. It says downtown west and Liberty Village have become the heart of the tech sector in the city.
Vancouver has 34,000 tech workers that make up 12 per cent of the office workforce. The go-to sub markets in British Columbia’s largest city have been Yaletown and Gastown.
High-tech employment in Vancouver has increased by 19.7 per cent since 2011, 12 times the rate of total employment.