Garry Marr: Why tracking the return to the office is no longer a thing in Toronto
The plan to discontinue the report comes amid realization that hybrid work is here to stay as office workers crave flexibility
By Garry Marr, Published Jun 29, 2026
About half a decade and a global pandemic later, the Strategic Regional Research Alliance is looking to finally pull the plug on tracking whether people are occupying Toronto offices.
There is little doubt occupancy has been going up since the pandemic ended, but the reality is that the trend has peaked, and some degree of hybrid or work-from-home is here to stay
More importantly, a new reality may be emerging that is less about people wanting lines drawn in the sand about when or where to be in the office and more about flexibility on when and where work happens.
“We stopped publishing it because it’s just not a binary call anymore. You are not in, and you are not out,” said Iain Dobson, a co-founder of the group, which informally dates back to 2008. The SRRA will likely publish a final report in March 2027 to mark the anniversary of the pandemic’s onset.
The group’s last numbers, published in February, serve as an exclamation point: the return to office is not just a dream of landlords. Average weekly office occupancy climbed to 86 per cent, the report found, with Wednesday close to 100 per cent and Friday just around 58 per cent.
“When we started this research for the city of Toronto and the BIAs (business improvement areas), they were very concerned at the beginning of the pandemic,” Dobson said. “Back then, remote work was an all-or-nothing thing. You either had an office or you didn’t.”
There were executives who travelled and might be in the office less often, but it was fairly easy to tell who was remote or who had a desk and was mostly at it. Dobson said only about five per cent of those employed by companies in downtown Toronto were not at desks before the pandemic
Flash forward to May 2026, and Statistics Canada reported that the proportion of employed Canadians working exclusively from home was 11.4 per cent, down one percentage point from the same month in 2025 and 7.3 percentage points from May 2022.
Now, this doesn’t mean that office towers are full. The latest data for the first quarter of 2026 shows the total office vacancy rate across Canada is still 17.2 per cent, according to real estate firm Avison Young.
But with no new supply delivered in the first quarter, compared to 1.3 million square feet a year earlier, it feels like landlords may finally be getting some traction, with supply and demand set to work in their favour in the coming years.
Still, the headwind of workers wanting more flexibility, and ultimately less time in office, is going to be hard to ignore.
A survey of 1,500 Canadian professionals by recruitment agency Robert Half found 44 per cent want to make a move for a “better” job in the second half of 2026. The top reasons were better benefits and perks and career enhancement, cited by 38 per cent of respondents
But one-third of the people planning to move on are doing so for greater flexibility, and 31 per cent for remote work options. The possibility of working remotely is a financial consideration when you factor in housing costs and how much they drop in smaller cities.
Real estate brokerage Royal LePage said a survey it recently conducted showed that 51 per cent of Canadians in the Greater Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver regions would consider buying a primary residence in what it calls more affordable cities.
Some type of office requirement has made that dream harder to realize and is probably a driver of collapsing prices in smaller exurbs.
There is a lot of blurring between remote work and flexible work, but Meena Dube, senior practice director at Robert Half, said bigger firms want people in the office.
While there are exceptions being made, the general consensus is that workers are more productive there
The belief that remote work is especially harmful to younger workers is also gaining traction. A paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that youth unemployment has risen dramatically since the pandemic because of the shift away from the office.
www.financialpost.com/real-estate/garry-marr-tracking-return-to-office-no-longer-toronto
