The economy may have been hit by the oil price slump but developers still view Calgary as a hot location for new commercial development. International property firm Grosvenor has just acquired its third site in the Beltline with plans for a mixed office and residential development. Agron Miloti of realtors Newmark Knight Frank Devencore told The Globe and Mail that Grosvenor was far from the only party interested in the site: “Competition is huge. Developers all over Canada are looking to invest in Calgary. The city’s on a down cycle as far as the economy goes, but demand for sites like these hasn’t waned at all.”
http://www.repmag.ca/market-update/calgary-still-hot-for-commercial-developers-201027.aspx
and from the Financial Post:

How the oil slump is breathing new life into Calgary’s commercial real estate market

The oil price downturn is creating a building opportunity for commercial real-estate developers in Calgary, home to Canada’s petroleum industry, rather than deterring investment, Mayor Naheed Nenshi said.
“Our downtown commercial market is very strong and we’re getting a lot of folks saying they had been priced out of Calgary and now here’s their chance,” he said Monday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “I’m told by these very, very large skyscraper builders and commercial property developers, mostly backed by pensions, that they are patient money, and they make their money by building at this point in the cycle.”
Nenshi has recently met with a property developer planning a new $600 million tower for the city, and there are two or three others with similar plans, he said, declining to name the investors.
Skyscrapers including the Bow, designed by British architect Norman Foster and the tallest building west of Toronto, have sprouted in Calgary’s downtown in past years as an oil boom supported a surge in employment. While the slide in crude prices over the past year resulted in thousands of job losses in the city, commercial and residential construction has continued as the population grows.
Last year, Calgary’s population increased by 40,000 people, contributing to a 16 per cent gain in the past five years to about 1.2 million, while the growth in energy, manufacturing and retail jobs kept unemployment below the national average. About a third of Calgary’s US$116 billion economy is dependent on the petroleum industry, down from about 55 per cent 20 years ago, Nenshi said.