Commercial real estate investors, owners and managers are acknowledging that entrenched social inequities undermine their workforces, their tenants and the value of their portfolios.

Although they increasingly rely on professional service providers to keep up with the complexities of compliance, owners/managers ultimately carry the responsibility for life safety and bear the brunt of enforcement.

Fittingly for 2020, both nominations for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards are tied to reporting how the property and facilities management sectors responded to the challenges of COVID-19.

Multifamily and industrial properties are routinely lumped together as favoured investment assets, but asset managers face divergent degrees of difficulty when they seek to mine value from energy performance.

As announced in the provincial budget, the Ontario government plans to equalize the business education tax (BET) rate at 0.88 per cent for 2021, equating to a $450-million tax cut province-wide.

The 2020 race2reduce field boasts more than 1,730 buildings encompassing 248 million square feet of space in common areas and tenant premises — an increase from 650 buildings covering 95 million square feet in 2019.

The six-month extension comes with an improved rate since the discount on pre-tax electricity consumption and transmission/distribution costs will increase to 33.2 per cent on November 1.

A promised $2 billion investment in large-scale building retrofits will be central to the Canadian government’s job creation ambitions. Energy efficiency champions have plenty of ideas of how and where the funds could be best leveraged.

After scrambling to recalibrate their models in the early days of COVID-19-related shutdowns, analysts with Ontario's Independent Electricity System Operator faced more uncharted territory when the hot weather arrived.

Proposals address a range of issues that are likely to be of interest to listed real estate entities and their investors, as well as start-up ventures and other publicly traded service providers to the industry.

Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance will be offered for a sixth month. The announcement comes eight days after the portal for new applications for the relief program appeared to be closed.

With the August 31 deadline for first-time applications for Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance (CECRA) now passed, the three-month program that evolved into five months of relief is closed to new recipients.

Many hydro accounts specifically tied to the common areas of multi-residential buildings will no longer qualify for the 31.8 per cent rebate beginning in November 2020.

A temporary adjustment to Ontario’s electricity pricing scheme eliminates cost-saving opportunities that many operators of large commercial buildings were anticipating this summer.

The City of Winnipeg has invited commercial building owners and institutional facility managers to affix their Energy Star Portfolio Manager results on a publicly accessible map.

Commuters’ willingness to jump on the bus, light-rail car or subway is expected to be a driving factor in repopulating office space in some major North American markets, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

The timing might have been opportune for uptake of the measure — provided it was adopted into provincial and territorial building codes — because it would have applied broadly in what is currently Canada’s most buoyant commercial real estate sector.