After purchasing a Boston office tower for $435M last month, Canadian investment giant Oxford Properties is preparing to buy more U.S. office. 

The deal represented the global investor’s first core U.S. office acquisition since 2017, and the company signaled that it was the start of a new strategy to buy up more assets in the recovering sector. Oxford spent years diversifying its portfolio away from office, even before the pandemic started, and it sees now as the right time to dive back into the sector. 

"As the market conditions are changing, not every investor can say, 'Hey, now's the time to go in,'" Oxford Properties U.S. Head of Investments Ankit Bhatt told Bisnow in an interview. "They sort of wait until the first movers have gone in. In our view, we get the benefit of seeing fundamentals and operating activity, leasing fundamentals on an almost daily, weekly or monthly basis."

"We're able to then point to momentum building up," he added.

The firm’s large office portfolio gives it this visibility into where the sector’s fundamentals are strongest, and Bhatt said he sees opportunity in a trio of technology hubs: Boston, New York and San Francisco.

The company is evaluating office assets with artificial intelligence in mind, analyzing how the technology could disrupt the specific tenants within each building, Bhatt said.

"In the world of AI and the digital world going forward, which tenancies are here to thrive? Which tenancies may face some level of shrinkage or expansion?" Bhatt said. "We take that into account in our underwriting, so that we're buying not just what's today, but we're going to see that growth down the road."

Oxford's last U.S. office acquisition before it shifted away from the space was in 2017, when it bought two Washington, D.C., office buildings at 900 16th St. NW and 1101 New York Ave. as part of a joint venture with Norges Bank Real Estate Management.

In the years since, the company has been reducing its exposure to the U.S. office market and ramping up in other sectors. 

While the office sector was fundamentally disrupted by the pandemic in 2020, Bhatt said Oxford decided to start selling office assets two years earlier because the low interest rate environment gave it the ability to maximize its proceeds. He said it recycled $14B globally out of the office sector.

Oxford, which has more than $86B in global assets under management, spent those years investing in other asset classes including logistics, multifamily and open-air retail. 

In the logistics space, the firm went from having nearly no investments in 2017 to roughly $7B within seven years.

"That approach allows us to not only diversify, but it just keeps the capital moving into the right conviction bets at the right time," Bhatt said.

Though the firm just launched its new office strategy in the U.S. last month, Bhatt said the company has previously acquired office assets in other countries, investing roughly $2B globally since last year.

Its latest U.S. acquisition came in the form of an 18-story Class-A office building in Boston's Seaport District for $435M, a deal that Bhatt said he was particularly interested in given the price. The well-located, fully leased building traded for just under $50M below the price Clarion Partners paid in 2019. 

Oxford already owned 3.2M SF of office in Boston, which Bhatt said helped give the firm insights into the city's leasing trends.

"One Marina Park is a good example where we literally saw on-the-ground leasing, saw the quality of the asset that was up, but then the pricing was quite interesting for us to then go and invest in a durable income in a submarket that continues to see demand for high-quality space," Bhatt said.

The Boston office market recorded 804K SF of positive absorption in the second quarter of 2026, a stark difference from the negative 144K SF in the same quarter in 2025, according to CBRE. Vacancy has decreased across the city from 19.1% to 18.7% over the last year.

Oxford plans to use this same strategy in other markets where it has a significant presence, including New York and San Francisco. New York has experienced the strongest office rebound, with vacancy at 11.6% at the end of the second quarter, having its busiest first half in office leasing since 2002, according to CBRE. 

These cities have also benefited from AI startups expanding and leasing space in trophy office assets. AI companies have leased roughly 21M SF of office space in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and another 9.4M SF in New York, Boston and Seattle, according to CBRE.

"We're looking at cities that are going to see rent growth happen, that are seeing durable tenant demand from all types of tenancies, not just one or two sectors, and more and more folks are in the office, and you're seeing the utilization, the occupancy grow as well," Bhatt said.

Bhatt said the firm is also "meaningfully interested" in pursuing new development, looking for opportunities to build more office and mixed-use projects in these cities.

At the beginning of the year, Oxford and partner Related Beal secured a $1.6B construction loan to build a 72-story office skyscraper at 70 Hudson Yards in New York City, which will be anchored by consulting firm Deloitte. The 1.4M SF tower is the largest ground-up office building to start construction in the country since the pandemic.

"We're able to do both income-led investments and also, in the right places with the right fundamentals, doing development as well," Bhatt said.