Plan is to add a million square feet of office and commercial space downtown, sources say
John Mackie
The Province
Amazon is looking at renting the old post office in downtown Vancouver.
Real-estate sources say the online retail giant wants to add a million square feet of office and commercial space downtown, part of an expansion to double the Vancouver Amazon workforce to 2,000 people by 2020.
Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment, and leasing agent Tony Astles of Bentall Kennedy said “any discussions we do or don’t have with tenants are confidential, sorry.”
The old post office is a mammoth 686,000-square-feet structure that occupies an entire block bounded by Georgia, Dunsmuir, Homer and Hamilton streets.
A proposed rezoning of the post office site was submitted to the city in November 2016 to build three towers on top of the existing seven-storey building. The design included a 17-storey office tower and 18- and 20-storey residential towers. The proposal was revised and resubmitted in May 2017 with three “slimmer” towers.
But a spokesperson for the City of Vancouver said “the applicant for the rezoning of the old post-office site has requested that the rezoning application be put on hold while they review their options for the site.”
Canada Post sold its former main downtown branch at 349 West Georgia St. in 2013, when it decided to move to a new building by the airport. The old post office was bought for $159 million by B.C. Investment Management Corp., one of Canada’s largest institutional investment managers.
The building opened in 1958, and is considered a fine example of the International Modern style. It was designed by McCarter and Nairne, the architects that designed the Marine Building, and is on Vancouver’s heritage register.
The interior is open and spacious. The biggest spaces are two storeys high and feature column-free areas that are almost as long as a football field. The building also has 2½ storeys of underground parking.
“It was built as a processing and distribution centre,” said John Atkin, a heritage expert. “So you had trucks come in, trucks go out, sorting, and big open spaces, so that you could run complex postal-sorting machines and conveyor belts, and all that stuff. So you have almost the perfect existing structure waiting there for a firm that would do stuff like Amazon, which is product in and product out.”
Amazon already has a large and growing presence in Metro Vancouver. In November, the Seattle company said it was leasing 150,000 sq. ft. of space in a nine-storey building that is going up at the southwest corner of Dunsmuir and Homer streets, which is across the street from the post office.
Amazon also rents space over seven floors of the Telus Garden tower at 520 West Georgia St., and has 50,000 sq. ft. of space through the shared office leasing firm WeWork at the Bentall III tower at 595 Burrard St.
In addition, Amazon has two local warehouses in New Westminster and Queensborough. The company also recently purchased Whole Foods, which has six locations in B.C., and owns AbeBooks in Victoria.
An estimated 1,000 people work for Amazon in downtown Vancouver, mainly in software and cloud development. But Vancouver isn’t on the short list of 20 cities Amazon selected as a possible second headquarters for its rapidly expanding business. The so-called HQ2 could bring an estimated $5 billion in investment to a community, along with 50,000 jobs.
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