The workplace mantra of more with less has been replaced by a new trend – more in less.

Across North America, large users of office space have been adopting smaller offices and open-office concepts to increase employee density up to 40 per cent.

Add to this increasing efficiency in the oilpatch, with the energy industry doing more drilling and exploration without proportionately increasing staff, and you start to affect the vacancy rate in office buildings.

A report last week by CB Richard Ellis Alberta Ltd. said that more Calgary downtown office space has come on to the market than has been occupied in six of the last seven quarters.

However, the extra 28,000 sq. ft. of space available in the second quarter of 2003 was small enough to leave the vacancy rate virtually unchanged at 13.8 per cent.

Mike Gigliuk, research director at the brokerage, said the oil industry is still reconciling its space needs from the previous two years. “It takes a while to work those (merger and acquisition) changes through the system,” he said.

This hasn’t been a big year for M&As but the previous two years were records. The number and size of small energy firms is one of the few areas of increasing demand for office space.

The report says downtown occupancy and tenant diversity hasn’t changed since 1997. The energy industry and other companies related to it indirectly account for 80 per cent of the office space in the core.

The CB Richard Ellis report said there was a strong correlation between drilling and office absorption from 1992 to 1999, but since 2000 occupancy downtown has dropped despite record drilling activity.

The firm anticipates little change in the downtown vacancy rate this year.

Edmonton’s industrial vacancy rate edged up slightly and downtown office leasing was stable on a year-to-year basis, according to Dean Wulf, vice-president and general manager of Royal LePage Commercial Inc.

Office vacancy was up to 13.2 per cent from 12.6 per cent. Industrial vacancy was 3.6 per cent of the market at the end of 2002, and rose to 3.7 per cent at mid-year. With just over half a million square feet of new product on the market, new space is leased fairly quickly.

“It’s a very, very healthy marketplace,” said Dave Young, vice-president and Edmonton manager for CB Richard Ellis.