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Pusateri's Fine Foods will be opening a 18k SF location at Oakville Place. We asked Pusateri prez Frank Luchetta what motivated him to sign a 15-year deal at the city's largest shopping centre.  RioCan REIT (which bought Oakville Place last year) is planning a $30M revamp to take the mall more upscale, which Frank says was key to his decision. He tells us Pusateri's had been eyeing the Oakville market for five years but had struggled to find a location that offered adequate square footage and parking. Then RioCan acquired Oakville Place, built in 1981, with plans to renovate starting next spring. Frank says he and RioCan COO Fred Waks began talking shortly after that.  RioCan will, over time, change the mall's tenant mix to become more of an upscale fashion centre, something akin to Miami's Bal Harbour Shops. (“That's where we made our deal,” Frank says. “We were sitting in Bal Harbour.”) Oakville has the demographics to support a higher-end shopping centre, and demand is there, he says. RioCan's hope is that securing Pusateri's as an anchor will draw other posh TO retailers. (How come nobody ever backs into parking spaces in renderings?)  Pusateri's will open at Oakville Place by holidays 2015, a quarter that's typically favourable to the food industry, Frank notes, and it will will occupy a newly built space. It's Pusateri's fourth expansion in the GTA; its first since opening a 10k SF Bayview Village location (above) in 2010. In the intervening years, Pusateri's built a 10k SF commissary kitchen that produces all of its in-house products. “We're now in a position where we can expand our brand,” Frank says. |
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How Bramalea Mall Punches Above Its Weight |
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 Operations manager Bao Lu realizes Bramalea City Centre can't compete with Square One, Yorkdale, or the Eaton Centre in shoppers' minds. “But we're still the fourth-largest shopping centre in Ontario,” Bao, with Morguard Investments, tells Bisnow. “We want to punch above our weight class.” If recent accolades are any indication, it's succeeding: newly expanded BCC just snagged BOMA Canada's award for Outstanding Building of the Year in the Super Regional Shopping Centre category. (It won the BOMA Toronto equivalent earlier this year.) |
 Handed out in Winnipeg last week, the BOMA award cites BCC's leadership in energy conservation. The mall has new LED lighting, automated climate control and lighting systems, an electric-car charging station, rainwater harvesting, and a recycling program that diverts 70% of waste from landfill. BOMA also noted BCC's tenant and community relations and emergency preparedness. A 1.5M SF shopping centre with 350 stores, BCC will now compete for an international BOMA award in Los Angeles next June. The mall just signed Vancouver-based women's fashion boutique Aritzia, a 5,000 SF location slated to open by Christmas. |
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Chinese Firm Gets Into Toronto Condos A high-profile mixed-use downtown condo project has changed hands. Easton's Group of Hotels and The Remington Group sold their interest in King Blue, a two-tower development, to Shanghai-based Greenland Holding Group Co, a Chinese multinational that recently opened a Toronto office. (Purchase price was not disclosed.) King Blue, at the southeast corner of King Street and Blue Jays Way, is in pre-construction. Plans call for two towers, 44 and 48 storeys, incorporating the historic Westinghouse factory building at the base. The project will also include 13k SF of retail, possibly a hotel, and the Theatre Museum of Canada. The site was previously owned by David Mirvish.  Easton's Group president Steve Gupta says selling King Blue allows his firm to focus on other investment and development, including its second TO condo project, Dundas Square Gardens, at Dundas and Jarvis streets (978 units in conjoined 47- and 17-storey towers). He also assured King Blue purchasers and investors that they're "completely protected;" Greenland—a Fortune 500 global company that has made six other international acquisitions in 2014—has "assumed all commitments and have agreed to fulfill their responsibilities.” |
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