Downtown Windsor office vacancy rate the highest in Canada, but suburban rate improving: CBRE report

A for lease sign on the window of an office building at the corner of Ouellette Avenue and Wyandotte Street in downtown Windsor.

Some good news and bad news concerning the office vacancy rate in the Windsor area.

CBRE Windsor reports that downtown Windsor maintains the highest office vacancy rate in Canada, but Windsor’s suburban office market showed a year of positive performance and is below the national average.

An analysis of local market data from the first quarter of 2026 by CBRE Windsor Vice-President Brad Collins and Senior Vice-President Brook Handysides at Windsor CBRE found that downtown Windsor maintains the highest office vacancy rate in Canada at 40.6 per cent.

Downtown Windsor is followed by London at 31.5 per cent, Kitchener/Waterloo at 30.5 per cent, and Calgary at 29.9 per cent.

The report by the commercial real estate services and investment firm found the national downtown average office vacancy rate is 18.2 per cent.

Collins says the numbers for downtown Windsor are pretty much status quo from the same time a year ago.

“The major change that we’ve seen is more so in the suburban areas, so office and retail in the suburban areas, they remain steady if not actually strengthening in terms of lowering the vacancy rate, whereas downtown really hasn’t changed since we started tracking it a couple of years ago,” he says.

The report says Windsor’s suburban office market showed a year of positive performance, currently sitting at 12.1 per cent from 14.9 per cent in 2025, below the national suburban office average of 16.4 per cent.

Collins says companies across the country did consolidate their office space during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they haven’t seen the positive trends here that you see in major markets related to return to work versus work from home.

“We have not seen that take hold or have any impact on downtown as a positive tailwind. In the suburban market, I think we’ve seen a little bit of that. The vacancy rate dropped from 14.9 per cent to 12.1 per cent for the suburban office market, so that’s positive,” he says.

Collins says downtown office vacancy rates are consistently an issue across southwestern Ontario, not just in Windsor.

Downtown Windsor’s retail vacancy showed little change from a year ago, sitting at 33.1 per cent but CBRE does not publish downtown retail vacancy data for all major markets, but the rate is estimated to be the highest in Canada.

The analysis says that Windsor’s suburban retail market remains relatively tight at 3.7 per cent, down from 4.3 per cent previously, and continued leasing momentum in key power centre nodes across Windsor.

Collins says the takeaway is there is a long way to go for downtown to improve because they haven’t really seen it yet in the data.

“Suburban areas are really, really showing positive momentum. To have 3.7 per cent retail vacancy in major retail nodes is very low, which shows large retailers are still very positive on Windsor despite all the things going on in the market, and suburban offices are showing some positive momentum as well,” he says.

The suburban retail vacancy rate for Windsor also includes LaSalle, Tecumseh, and Lakeshore.