Announcement comes amid the company’s plans to offer more than 100 new jobs in Montreal this year
Attesting to the growing importance of tech companies in Canada’s commercial property market, video game giant Square Enix has revealed the further expansion of its presence in Montreal this year.
The Japanese conglomerate announced that it will be adding 10,000 square feet to the current 55,000 sq. ft. it is already occupying in downtown Montreal.
Square Enix stated that aside from extra leg room for its growing development team, the new space will also be accommodating facilities handling motion capture, mixing, and voice work.
This will come amid plans to offer more than 100 new game development jobs in Montreal in 2019. The additions will complement the firm’s nearly 700 employees working in its two studios in Montreal, which is currently the largest Square Enix development unit working outside Japan.
“For the last decade, the Square Enix group has massively invested in Quebec and is dedicated to continuing its investments in the coming years,” the company stated in its news release earlier this week.
In recent years, office space has become the leading commercial asset class in Canada’s largest markets, according to CBRE.
This can be largely attributed to steadily growing demand from the high-technology industry, which has especially benefited the Montreal and Toronto tech hubs.
“The push for urban product is extremely strong,” Royal Bank of Canada’s Gary Morassutti said, as quoted by The Globe and Mail.
“Increasingly, the areas of growth in Canada are all about technology and our growing knowledge economy. Technology is the catalyst, change agent and king-maker and its impact is rippling through every sector of our market,” he explained in late February.
“Over the past 10 years, tech has grown at more than 2.5 times the pace of the energy sector and three times the overall economy,” Morassutti added. “Tech companies anchoring new buildings is something we have virtually never seen before.”
