Recovery hasn’t been easy, but in what’s now the fifth year since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, downtown Winnipeg’s lingering case of reluctance is beginning to taper off, little by little, at least when it comes to vacancies.
During an event celebrating the re-opening of the Portage and Main intersection on July 8 — which encouraged people from all corners of the city to give each other resounding high-fives as they crossed the nationally-recognized criss-cross — Darren Yewchyn, who operates a hotdog stand mere steps away, remembers what it was like in 2003 — a ghost town.
About 70 per cent of the regular business at this cart comes from workers stopping by on their lunch breaks. Customers have been steadily coming back on a year-to-year basis.
“Last year, I saw it (the foot traffic) getting a bit better when compared to the year before that (2024),” he says. “Last year, I was a lot happier. And this year — definitely happier, having more and more people in the office and back to work, out walking around and cruising around on lunch breaks … and shopping in the little stores around here.”
“Traffic has picked up,” Yewchyn continued. “The corner (of Portage and Main) opened up recently, and I think more and more people are starting to make new adjustments, transitioning into using the corner.”
“I can definitely see more people downtown,” he says.
According to a report published by Colliers Canada in April, the first quarter of 2025 saw a 2.7 per cent rise in vacancies for the entire city, which is 10 basis points higher than last year.
But the Winnipeg Downtown BIZ (business improvement zone), which covers the economic landscape of the 730-acre downtown neighbourhood, has different numbers due to its tighter boundaries.
A report for the downtown BIZ found a 29.57 per cent hike in pedestrian foot traffic in the first quarter. That’s up slightly from 2024, but remains a significant jump from a devasting low in 2023.
In the same report, the BIZ noted a slight decline in vacancy rates for the downtown area. Winnipeg and Vancouver B.C. saw the largest decreases in their downtown vacancies among Canadian cities, going from 18.7 per cent in the final quarter of 2024 to 18.2 per cent during the first months of 2025 (for Winnipeg). This is the biggest decline in vacancy rates since the first quarter of 2020.
Although he doesn’t have a crystal ball, Peter George, co-founder of Show and Tell (formerly McKim Communications), says he isn’t sure downtown will ever feel like it did pre-pandemic.
George owns part of the historic McKim building located at the corner of Main Street and Bannatyne Avenue and says he has noticed downtown getting busier.
“Part of (the return) is employers … they want people to come back to the office,” George says, adding that collaboration is easier and productivity is often better when people work together. “It’s easier to remember people you see every day.”
While some businesses work better in-person, others have been able to thrive in a remote setting.
Many advertising businesses, for example, have gone fully remote, while other professions, such as lawyers or architects will always need an in-person office, George says.
But now that many people have become accustomed to working from home — and all its perks — calling workers back into an in-person environment isn’t simple. How do you compete with home, sweet home?
In 201 Portage’s case, amenities are a big draw.
In the last year, vacancies have gone down nearly four per cent, falling from 11.3 in June of 2024 to 7.5 per cent today, according to Gail Auriti, a local broker at Harvard Developments, a Saskatchewan-based real estate company which manages property across western Canada, including the second-tallest building in Winnipeg.
“Our building (vacancies have) gone down for sure,” she says, adding that significant investments have gone into improving the building and making it an enjoyable place to work. It boasts a restaurant, a 2,500 square-foot food court, Uptown by 529, a 24-hour gym and fitness facility on the seventh floor, daily and monthly public parking as well as facility rentals for tenants.
“It’s the quality of our building that makes people want to work here,” Auriti says. “It helps bring people back downtown.”
According to both Colliers and Downtown BIZ, with no new major developments planned for the area, downtown vacancies will remain stable for the foreseeable future.
Vacancy rates down
According to a recent report by Winnipeg-based Capital Commercial Real Estate, 2024 was the first year office vacancy rates in Winnipeg went down since the shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This was largely due to the completion of large-scale projects, such as the new Wawanesa Insurance headquarters at True North Square and the first phase of Polaris Place in north Winnipeg, which added a collective 400,000 square feet of office space to the market last year.
Another report from CBRE, a national real estate company, predicted that vacancy rates would peak in 2025 and begin to recover by early 2026 — a similar trajectory to the economic recession in the mid-1990s — but recent numbers from Colliers Canada and the Winnipeg Downtown BIZ district tell a more optimistic story, with downtown rates on the steady decline and a prediction that things will hover in place for the foreseeable future.
A major game-changer, according to Capital, is True North Real Estate Development’s just-started redevelopment of Portage Place mall. TNRED acquired the mall through a partnership with the Southern Chiefs’ Organization in September of 2024. The mall is set to be transformed into a $650-million multi-use facility, which will help improve the quality of life in the downtown community.
