Parking lot owners don’t have lot to say

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2010 (5412 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the city’s biggest surface parking lot owners said he’d happily sell his lots if a developer offered him the right price.

Until now, though, Harry Reiss says no one has offered him more than he makes from his four parking lots and he’s not convinced more government incentives like tax breaks or long-term grants will change that.

“I’m looking for an investment that doesn’t take up a lot of time, that issues better returns than the bank,” said Reiss, who co-owned Reiss Furs on King Street for decades. “I have confidence that in the future prices will go up.”

Through a firm called Harvic Investments, Reiss owns four small lots scattered around the downtown, including one in the East Exchange and two south of Portage Avenue. Through another venture, Bedford Investments, the Reiss family recently built a parkade on King Street, one of the few new parkades to be built downtown in years.

About 20 per cent of downtown Winnipeg’s 154 surface parking lots are owned by government but the rest are owned by a diverse array of developers and companies like Air Canada and the Cambrian Credit Union. Except for Reiss, most of the major surface lot owners didn’t want to talk about their properties or what it would take to develop them into condos, shops or offices.

Huntington Real Estate Investment Trust, which has an interest in seven lots, didn’t respond to a half-dozen phone calls and emails sent to staff in Winnipeg, Vancouver and New York.

Officials with Lombard Place Ltd., which owns four lots just east of Portage & Main, failed to return several calls over the last two weeks. Lombard Place is owned by the Richardson family, pegged last week by Canadian Business magazine as the country’s 13th richest family.

A spokesman said Hartley Richardson was out of the country and likely wouldn’t be willing to discuss his surface lots.

CentreVenture president and CEO Ross McGowan said the downtown development agency has approached several surface lot owners in recent years, asking them to sell, with little luck.

The city and province recently announced a $20-million tax credit program to spur new residential development downtown, especially in vacant or underused buildings. And Mayor Sam Katz promised to freeze property taxes for five years on any development on a downtown surface lot.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca

Downtown Winnipeg's Surface Parking Lots
Publicly owned lots are indicated by red pointers; private lots are indicated by yellow pointers.

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