MONTREAL — In a sign that it is betting on a robust post-pandemic return to the office, Lightspeed is doubling the size of its Old Montreal headquarters.

The Montreal-based POS software company has signed a 10-year lease to occupy 90,000 square feet over six floors of Place Gare Viger. The move makes Lightspeed the anchor tenant of Viger, a former train station converted into a million-square-foot office, retail and living space. While Lightspeed had plans to increase its office space, the company’s outsized growth during the pandemic has necessitated an increase in its footprint. The space will be able to accommodate about 650 employees, said Lightspeed spokesperson Lisa Laventure.  

“We’re strong believers that life is better with a blend of physical and digital, so we want the office to be a destination,” Lightspeed president JP Chauvet told The Logic. “There’s a lot of meeting spaces, a lounging area; there’s a lot of collaborative meeting spaces, so we’re not taking the traditional approach and putting offices in one next to the other.”

The company currently plans to grow to roughly 2,000 employees worldwide. Chauvet said the company will allow staff to work from home, from the office or in a hybrid model incorporating both. An internal poll of Lightspeed employees suggested 92 per cent liked the idea of being able to work from home and use the office as a place for meetings and networking, according to the company, and over 80 per cent said they were just as or more productive when working remotely. 

“As we get out of the pandemic, there might be a pendulum swing to the other side, because a lot of people are going to want to meet and then get to know their colleagues, but I do think that there’s benefits of keeping the flexible approach,” Chauvet said.

The Canadian operations of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis are also moving into Viger, where 430 employees will occupy 40,000 square feet in the project, with room for about 300 workers from outside Montreal to work. In an interview, Novartis Canada president Christian Macher said Viger’s proximity to Montreal’s AI and health-care sectors was key in its decision to move from its current headquarters in the Montreal suburb of Dorval. The company partnered with AI research institute Mila in October, and Macher said it is looking to extend partnerships with the CHUM, one of two Montreal super hospitals, whose campus is less than a 10-minute walk from Viger.

“We think that we can only solve the future of healthcare challenges for partnerships and collaborations, and where we are placed now, we don’t have the opportunity to rub shoulders with the ecosystem,” Macher said. 

The moves reflect a growing optimism in Montreal’s commercial real estate sector. The city’s office buildings—as elsewhere, hammered by the pandemic—have seen an uptick in activity in the downtown core, with commercial subleases, which rose rapidly last year in an indication of the pandemic’s toll, at their lowest levels in the last four quarters, according to a recent CBRE report. The city and government officials recently launched “I love working downtown,” an $8.5-million charm offensive to lure workers back to the downtown core.

Located on roughly six acres of land, the Viger project is based around Gare Viger just north of Montreal’s Old Port. Designed by architect Bruce Price, the buildings served as the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Montreal hub until it ceased operations in 1951. Montreal-based real estate developer Jesta Group acquired the property in 2012, and Lightspeed became a tenant in 2015. Along with its office space, Viger includes 321 high-end apartments, which will include small work-from-home spaces and work pods in the resident lounge as well as a 36,000-square-foot pedestrian courtyard. 

“The overall vision did not change much since pre-pandemic, because we feel the pandemic isn’t going to have a significant long-term effect on the overall usage. But it forced us to rethink about each usage component. Things like security, health, and access to a natural environment outdoors became much more important to us than before,” said Jesta Group senior managing director Anthony O’Brien.