Alberta

The City of Calgary has a deal for you: a vacant quarter-acre commercial lot on 16th Avenue NW with frontage on the TransCanada Highway and close to transit. And the price is a mere $1.25 million, or $5 million per acre.

The potential building boom would represent the biggest in 30 years.

Vancouver-based Hungerford Properties plans to transform what was once Calgary’s largest manufacturing plant into a massive business park by this summer.

Major oil companies shoving excess space onto the market has nearly doubled Calgary’s downtown office vacancy rate and help notch four straight quarters of negative office leasing downtown. During 2013, overall absorption was negative by 1.

Alberta's population has officially topped the 4 million mark. Statistics Canada counted 4,025,074 Albertans as of July 1.

The Calgary satellites of Airdrie, Cochrane and Okotoks all recorded the highest third-quarter sales activity on record in September, mostly as a result of gains in the single-family home sector, reports the Calgary Real Estate Board.

An Asian-style mega-mall – where space will be sold, not leased – is expected to join the industrial and commercial horizon of Balzac, just north of Calgary.

Edmonton posted $1.6 billion in commercial real estate sales in the first half of 2013, up almost $350 million from the same period in 2012 but still far below the heady days before the 2008 recession.

Giant retailer Costco opened a 155,000-square-foot store in St. Albert on October 24 as part of the Landrex Developers mixed-use development in Erin Ridge North.

Seen as a harbinger of future development, land sales have become the dominant driver in Calgary's commercial real estate sector, with sales topping a whopping average of $150 million per month this year.