Article
CBRE Sells Saskatoon’s River Centre Office Building
October 1, 2025 4 Minute Read
Office is officially no longer a dirty word on the Prairies.
Case in point: CBRE’s National Investment Team - Saskatchewan has sold River Centre, a ~75,000 sq. ft. Class A office building in downtown Saskatoon.
River Centre, at 475 2nd Avenue South in the heart of the River Landing District, is nearly 100% leased with a blue chip roster of national tenants, including KPMG, whose signage adorns the building, BMO Nesbitt Burns, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), NexGen Energy and ATB Financial.
Sold for $29.1 million, River Centre promises to provide local purchaser AMG Real Estate Corp. with “exceptional income stability for years to come,” says CBRE Saskatchewan Managing Director Michael Bratvold, whose team brokered the sale on behalf of the vendor.
“This deal is important because you see very little stabilized office space trading these days in Saskatoon,” he adds, noting that the 2022 sale of Princeton Tower and PCS Tower – sold by CBRE to local developer and landlord Duchuck Holdings – was the last transaction of note.
“Office has been a tough sell over the past few years, but the tide has turned and momentum is attracting investors back into this space.”
Courting Private Buyers
TD Asset Management, which manages River Centre, reached out to Bratvold seeking his team’s opinion on the prospects for a potential sale of the property. “We knew the market would be challenging,” says Bratvold. “Most lenders were not really touching office. Still, we knew some lenders would give it a good look. We knew there would be interest.”
Investment in Saskatchewan real estate is being driven by private buyers, who have pools of cash to make a purchase but are looking for well-located and well-managed properties like River Centre.
“The first choice of assets tends to be essential retail and industrial,” Bratvold says. “But River Centre is different. We haven’t seen office assets perform like this. So we knew it would likely be a private buyer who takes a look at this, and it’s priced in a range that would be achievable for groups like those.”
Local Investor Steps Up
Bratvold and his team took the building out to market and knew there were about a dozen local groups that might have interest. It eventually came down to a competition among three, and ultimately River Centre was snapped up by AMG Real Estate, a private firm based in Regina.
And as Bratvold had suspected, a local lender, a credit union, stepped up to finance the deal, which closed within four months of River Centre going on the market.
“We wanted to create value for our client by creating a bit of competition,” Bratvold says. “And we were pleased with how the value was seen by all parties. We were happy with the interest we received. And now a nice institutional grade asset has gone into the hands of a local buyer.
“It’s a good news story for Saskatchewan.”
Recovering Market
Saskatoon’s downtown office leasing market is still slowly recovering from COVID, says Bratvold, “and we’ve still got a way to go to bring vacancy rates down.”
Saskatoon, like most other cities, is a tale of two office markets. Class A / AAA vacancy downtown is currently less than 5%, and there are only six downtown buildings in this category. Meanwhile Class B vacancy is hovering around 16%.
Activity and interest in office leasing has been picking up, however, and Bratvold says his team has been taking tenants on more tours and entertaining requests for proposals from landlords looking to lease their spaces. “It’s a slow and small market. It doesn’t have the velocity you see in other biggest markets, but we’re still seeing green shoots emerging for office.”
And if investors see the right opportunity, they’re willing to seize it. River Centre is a good example. “Although it is such a rare bird on the market,” Bratvold says.
Still, the sale of a substantial office building will help buoy market sentiment, “and we need that,” he says. “It’s nice to see local capital willing to be placed in our downtown with the right asset.”
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