Long & McQuade moving to new location

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This article was published 03/01/2024 (983 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Later this year a building that has been redeveloped into a multi-tenant retail and entertainment building — with two different addresses — will become the location for Long & McQuade’s new store and regional distribution centre.

Long Holdings, the Toronto music store’s real estate division, has acquired the 120,000-square-foot building on nine acres between St. Matthews and Ellice avenues east of Empress Street for an undisclosed amount.

Stephan Leenheer, Long Holdings Inc. vice-president, said the company will be spending “millions of dollars” building out the 50,000 square feet of space that Long & McQuade will occupy, hopefully by the end of the year. The company will move out of its current location on Wall Street.

Leenheer said the company has been motivated for some time to find another space because the Wall Street location did not allow the company to offer music lessons at that location, something that already happens at more than 90 per cent of its 101 locations across the country.

Long & McQuade is the largest music lesson provider in Canada, conducting more than 30,000 sessions per week.

“Lessons may be a small portion of our revenue, but they’re an important portion,” Leenheer said. “Teaching people how to use the things we sell and developing musicians is really important to us.”

The space is bigger than a typical Long & McQuade store with about 20,000 square feet to be dedicated to retail and lessons and the remainder to become a regional distribution centre.

It’s a new development for the company that was formed in Toronto 67 years ago.

“It’s a model that works for us,” Leenheer said. “It makes sense for us to be vertically integrated. Our website has become an important part of our business. Having product close to our customers is critical for us to compete these days.

“While our long-term strategy is to control distribution and have product close to the customer, our focus is still our in-store experience and that should not be understated.”

The company has a similar distribution operation on the west side of Montreal and is in the process of building similar-sized operations from scratch in Halifax and Calgary.

Long & McQuade will move into the space currently occupied by Bianca Amor’s Liquidation Supercentre, an unusual discount emporium with bare concrete floors and a bizarre assortment of product from packaged food to carpets to knives and machetes.

Michael Stronger, senior vice-president retail and investments at Shindico Realty, who brokered the sale of the building, said it was a deal that worked for all the parties involved.

“It’s great news for everyone involved because everybody ended up succeeding and achieving their goals,” he said.

While Long & McQuade needed more space and wanted to stay in the west end/Polo Park area, Stronger said Bianca Amor’s wanted to move to a smaller location but stay in the area. (Stronger said it has found another location on St. James Street.)

“It’s rare that you can be involved in things where it’s positive for that many sides of the coin,” he said. “It’s also a great vote of confidence for Winnipeg and the Polo Park area.”

Stronger said the building’s vendor, the family of Sidney I. Robinson who formerly operated S.I.R. Warehouse at the location which was sold to Cabela’s in 2007 to become the American hunting fishing and outdoor merchandiser’s first ever Canadian location, was also happy with the deal.

The Robinson family bought the building from MTS, which had used it as a fleet management location. The Robinson family continued to own the building after it sold its business to Cabela’s.

The building tenants also include Dollarama, Aaron’s, a rent-to-own furniture, electronics and appliance store, and Uptown Alley, which occupies the south end of the building with a St. Matthews Street address where it operates a sprawling bowling, arcade and restaurant operation that opened in 2018.

Stronger said the building has undergone all sorts of redevelopment over the years. The unusual building configuration also includes about 9,000 square foot campus of Yellowquill University College, the entrance of which is on the west side of the building and can’t really be seen from either Ellice Avenue or St. Matthews Avenue.

Stronger said the unique property needed a certain kind of owner who would be able to properly manage such a multi-tenant situation.

Leenheer said, “It’s not a building that a lot of people would want necessarily unless you have the infrastructure to handle it. We already have a portfolio of 150 tenants in addition to our Long & McQuade businesses. We have the internal resources to manage the situation.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca