Seeing the Big Picture

Seeing the Big Picture

How Epic Investment Services Manages for the Long Game

Epic Investment Services has managed Centre 10 since the building was added to its portfolio in November of 2020. In that time, the building has maintained occupancy levels that consistently exceed the Calgary office market average, a result of a management model that aligns leasing, property management, and asset strategy on a shared set of priorities at all times.

Centre 10 is a Class A office tower in Calgary's Beltline neighbourhood, close enough to downtown that tenants get the access without the downtown price tag. The building is 98.5% occupied: in a Calgary office market that has endured the effects of commodity cycles, a global pandemic, and ongoing economic uncertainty, this occupancy rate is a significant achievement. It directly reflects the results of Epic's long-term approach.

Lyndsey Paterson, General Manager at Epic's Calgary office, is direct about the standard the firm holds itself to. "You really want people to be able to go about their business and their day without thinking about the building," she says. "There shouldn't really be any reason that they think about what their property manager may or may not be doing."

Coordination as a Competitive Advantage

The most significant structural advantage Epic brings to Centre 10 is one that sounds straightforward but is genuinely rare in practice. The property management and leasing teams work out of the same Calgary office, in daily contact, with Paterson's desk sitting directly outside the leasing team's workspace. What that proximity produces is a level of coordination between two functions that, at many firms, operate with little meaningful overlap.

The effects of isolation are well-known to anyone who has experienced a commercial lease. Expectations set during the leasing process routinely fail to survive contact with operational reality. A tenant meets their property manager for the first time on move-in day and finds that the experience they were promised and the experience they are getting are not the same thing. The property management team spends the early part of the relationship managing that gap.

Epic eliminates that gap by design. Because leasing and property management are aligned throughout the entire deal process, the handoff from prospect to tenant happens without the disconnect. Everything is agreed upon before a tenant ever takes occupancy.

"The tone is already set," Paterson says. "The expectations are mutual. We all know what the steps are. There are no surprises and no disappointment." Syhlonyk is equally direct about the interdependence. "They don't have buildings to run and tenants to manage if we don't put them in there," she says. "We work together on vacant suite improvements, capital expenditures, and building upgrades. One really can't exist without the other."

When a lease is being negotiated, that collaboration extends beyond the financial terms. The leasing team considers how a deal will affect building operations, not just whether it pencils out on a spreadsheet. "When negotiating a lease, we don't just look at the financial perspective," Syhlonyk says. "We consider how it impacts operations and on-site management."

Staying Ahead of the Building

Epic's approach to capital investment at Centre 10 is built on a simple yet frequently ignored principle. Consistent, smaller expenditures in preventative maintenance are significantly less disruptive and less costly to tenant relationships than large reactive ones triggered by deferred attention. Epic’s in-house team engages and works alongside trusted exterior engineering consultants on large-scale projects to identify what the building needs and when, and to present those recommendations to ownership with the context needed to make confident decisions.

"It's a little bit all the time versus a lot all of a sudden," Paterson says.

As Centre 10 ages, that discipline becomes increasingly important. Buildings that focus solely on short-term cost reductions often reach a point where necessary investments cannot be postponed any longer, leading to a substantial expense all at once. Epic's performance at Centre 10 demonstrates the positive results of consistent and forward-thinking capital management over time. As a result, the building remains competitive, and the tenant base stays stable. And when new ownership arrived recently, they inherited an asset whose condition reflected years of deliberate attention rather than years of managed decline.

Getting Ahead of the Market

The leasing strategy at Centre 10 during the COVID period is one of the clearest illustrations available of what proactive management produces when conditions deteriorate.

As the pandemic approached, Syhlonyk and the leasing team identified every tenant whose lease was set to expire in the coming years and began working on renewals well ahead of schedule. The goal was to stagger expiry dates, lock in early blend-and-extend agreements, and keep vacancy low at a time when the rest of the Calgary office market was heading in the opposite direction.

"We were proactive in retaining tenants, staggering expiry dates, and doing early renewals," Syhlonyk says. "We wanted to keep our occupancy high, which defied what was happening in the rest of the market. We had very little downtime on backfilling the vacancies we did get back."

The Calgary office market shifted dramatically through and after COVID. Pension funds began to exit the market, allowing private ownership groups to acquire assets. Tenant improvement packages and rental incentives reached unprecedented levels, but they have only recently started to stabilize. There has been a flight to quality, which has focused demand on buildings that can demonstrate a strong combination of location, management quality, and physical condition.

Centre 10's position through all of that reflects the cumulative effect of the strategy Syhlonyk describes. The building, by her assessment, is positioned among higher-performing assets in the Beltline, with strong parking, a floor plate that supports larger tenants, and a location just outside downtown that remains walkable to everything in the core. Those are physical attributes. The occupancy numbers are the result of how the team, working with the asset’s ownership on strategy, managed around and through the building’s fundamentals.

"We weren't waiting for leases to expire before having the conversation. Remaining proactive and getting out in front of those renewals early is what kept us ahead of the market," Syhlonyk says. "Seeing that translate into actual value that the owner could capitalize on was a major lesson. We were able to add a lot of value to the asset."

Communication throughout the project was tailored to each stakeholder. Ownership, with a high degree of trust already established with the asset management team, received updates at key decision points. The property management team tracked progress closely on a weekly basis, managing tenant communication and building operations throughout the construction period.

The Trust Equation

Tenant retention in a volatile market ultimately comes down to trust. A tenant who believes their management team is reachable, responsive, and genuinely invested in the building will weigh the cost and disruption of relocating against the certainty of staying somewhere that works. Even when more affordable space is available nearby, it often does not make sense to move if there is a strong management relationship in place. Effective management builds trust by ensuring staffing continuity and maintaining high-quality communication.

"Things are inevitably going to go wrong," Paterson says. "But if a tenant has trust in their team, they're at least going to say: okay, this is frustrating, but I know they're going to take care of it. That's what we want to be. Their comfort. Not the source of their panic."

Central to that trust is a layer of the operation that rarely makes it into asset strategy discussions. The on-site operators are the people tenants interact with every day. When an elevator is down or a common area needs attention, it is the operators who respond. Epic is deliberate about placing operators at its properties who carry the same service orientation as the broader organization. It is a cultural standard that runs through every level of the building team, and company as a whole.

Earning the Mandate

When Centre 10 transitioned to a new ownership group, tenant interviews were conducted as part of the PSA due diligence process. The results produced a candid assessment of the building's strengths and the areas the team was already working to address.

The feedback confirmed the effectiveness of Epic's strategy. Centre 10's Beltline location is viewed as a competitive advantage, offering walkable distance to the downtown core at a lower cost, while presenting the kind of urban considerations common to a central Beltline address that the team actively manages as part of its day-to-day operations. The management team's responsiveness, the continuity of on-site staff, and the quality of communication consistently registered as the primary reasons tenants had stayed and planned to continue doing so.

The new ownership group, experienced landlords by any measure, recognized what they were inheriting. Not just a managed asset, but a fully integrated service model with financial analysis capability, investment expertise, national sustainability programming, and leadership accessible enough that ownership groups have direct lines to Epic's senior team rather than working through intermediaries.

Alignment between asset strategy and day-to-day execution, Syhlonyk notes, is non-negotiable. "If you don't understand the asset management strategy, it's hard to execute," she says. "Knowing if someone wants to dispose of an asset versus making a longer-term commitment impacts how you allocate capital and what you recommend."

The new ownership group discovered that the leasing and property management teams were already aligned on their priorities. This alignment demonstrated the effectiveness of Epic's integrated model, showcasing the results achieved when given time and consistent execution. "We are driving value," Syhlonyk says. "We are very involved, hands-on, and proactive, not just reactive. We treat every building like it's our own money."

At Centre 10, this strategy has resulted in a fully occupied building, even in a market where many ownership groups are feeling significantly less confident. The strong occupancy rates and the long tenure of the on-site team are clear evidence of this success. Further, the new ownership group's decision to retain Epic, despite having the option to select anyone else, is the icing on the cake.

Lyndsey Paterson

General Manager

Lindsay Syhlonyk

VP, Leasing (Western Canada)