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Total commercial real estate investments in the city plunged $1.1 billion from 2014 to 2015, ac-cording to research by Barclay Street Real Estate, which tallied total dollar volume last year at $1.5 billion.

MEG Energy Corp. needs less than half the office space it is on the hook for in downtown Calgary after it paused its ambitious growth plan last year.

The depressed state of the Calgary office market evokes memories of the city’s situation seven years ago. What’s still unknown is if it will recover as quickly this time around. “What is very similar in comparing January 2009 to January 2016 is the amount of inventory in the office market that was under construction,” said Dan Harmsen, vice-president and associate broker for Barclay Street Real Estate, which recently released reports on Calgary’s downtown, Beltline and suburban office markets for the final quarter of 2015.

Calgary’s retail real estate market remained resilient during 2015 despite the drop in discretionary spending, says a new report by Barclay Street Real Estate. The overall vacancy rate rose to 2.7 per cent, up by 0.4 per cent from 2014. “The major impact on vacancy stemmed largely from successive retail chain store closures with Big Box space, which had been essentially zero for years, suddenly coming to market as Target Canada exited after two years of successive losses and Best Buy began a rebranding campaign that included closing down its sister brand Future Shop,” said the report.