Ottawa's downtown office market has been struggling for years, and now another building in the core is being eyed for a conversion to residential units, according to a new report from CTV News.
The building sits in the heart of downtown, an area that has seen office vacancy rates climb well past pre-pandemic levels as remote and hybrid work stuck around longer than many landlords expected. Empty floors that once held cubicles and boardrooms are increasingly seen as an opportunity rather than a liability, especially with the city desperate for more housing supply.
Why office-to-residential conversions make sense for Ottawa
The City of Ottawa has been actively encouraging these kinds of conversions for a few years now, offering incentives and streamlined approvals to property owners willing to turn empty office space into apartments or condos. The logic is straightforward: the downtown core has a glut of underused commercial real estate and a shortage of housing, so matching the two solves two problems at once.
It also helps keep downtown Ottawa from becoming a ghost town outside of business hours. More residents living in the core means more foot traffic for restaurants, shops, and services that have struggled since 2020, when many office workers left for good and never fully came back.
The challenges with converting office towers
Not every office building is a good candidate for residential conversion. Older towers often have floor plates that are too deep for natural light to reach interior units, plumbing and electrical systems built for offices rather than kitchens and bathrooms in every unit, and structural quirks that can make the retrofit expensive. Developers doing this kind of work in Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada have found that some buildings pencil out easily while others need significant government support to make the numbers work.
Still, with construction costs for new-build housing remaining high and land in the downtown core already serviced with transit, water, and power, conversions can be a faster and sometimes cheaper way to add units than building from scratch.
What this means for Ottawa residents
For Ottawa residents watching rents climb and housing supply lag behind population growth, any additional units downtown are a welcome sign. The city has set ambitious housing targets in recent years, and conversions like this one are part of the toolkit officials are counting on to help hit those numbers without waiting years for greenfield development on the outskirts of the city.
It also fits into the broader vision some urban planners have pushed for downtown Ottawa: a more mixed-use core where people don't just work but actually live, shop, and spend their evenings. A wave of office-to-residential conversions could reshape what downtown feels like over the next decade, turning it into less of a nine-to-five business district and more of a genuine neighbourhood.
More details on the specific building and timeline are expected as the project moves through city approvals.
Source: CTV News
