LloydMall is actively negotiating with future tenants to fill the space that was once occupied by Sears.
Triovest Realty Advisors are the landlords of the mall and have been marketing the space for some time. John Crombie, Senior Vice President of Retail Leasing says they have seen a number of inquiries and now know the space will be occupied by multiple retailers.
“In a perfect world we’d love to have one large user to take the whole space from a cost basis, but when we’ve looked out in the market place and who’s out there and size wise we know we’re gonna be in a position that we need to split the space into smaller units.”
The 40,000 square foot space has been vacant since November 2017 and Crombie says that Sears surrendered their tenancy in December. He adds that Sears going under wasn’t a complete surprise to many after they let go a lot of their stores, most notably the location in Toronto’s Eaton Centre.
Triovest Realty say they have a serious inquiry for just over half the space right now and are in negotiations, but can’t divulge any details due to confidentiality. They also have three or four interested retailers that have drawn up some paperwork that they are going back and forth with for the other half of the space.
Crombie says it’s not just about filling the space, but filling it with the right retailers to create an ideal tenant mix.
“We don’t want to duplicate retailers there, we want to make sure that we have retailer that kind of fit into where the direction we want to go in Lloyd Mall and also what the customer base is looking for in terms of retailers so that’s what we call tenant mix.”
Despite the troubles of the Alberta economy, Crombie says he is pleased with the inquiries they have received so far and because of that they are not looking for a temporary fix.
“We have put temporary tenants in there, but we’re electing not to do that this time, what we call pop ups or short term type of tenancies. So we’re not doing that and primary from the fact that we’ve actually had a lot of very strong interest and activity in terms of the centre.”
They are hoping to have the space filled with stores by Christmas.