Quebec department store looking for space in Winnipeg

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This article was published 27/08/2015 (3922 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Quebec-based Simons department store chain is still keen to open a store in Winnipeg, but it won’t be in the former Target store on St. James Street.

“We’ve looked at the Target and said, ‘It’s not for us,’ ” said an official with DTZ Canada, the real estate firm that is helping the expansion-minded Simons find suitable new store locations in Canada.

Don Rogers, DTZ’s senior vice-president of retail and business development, said Simons prefers its stores be attached to a major shopping mall. While the former Target store in the Plaza at Polo Park retail development is only a stone’s throw from Winnipeg’s largest shopping mall — Polo Park — it’s too far away for Simons.

Rogers said the two Winnipeg shopping centres Simons is interested in are Polo Park and St. Vital Centre, which is the city’s second largest mall.

“We’re going to Polo or St. Vital, one or the other.”

He said they’ll be talking to Cadillac Fairview, which owns and manages the Polo Park mall.

“We have a plan, but it isn’t anywhere near the finalization stage,” he added.

Finding enough space in the existing mall could be a challenge, as Simons stores are typically about 100,000 square feet in size.

“But it can be on two levels,” Rogers noted.

He also said it will likely be another three or four years before Simons is ready to open a store here. CEO Peter Simons announced last November the family-run business was planning to open stores in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., between this fall and March 2017.

“We can only open two or three a year, you know. But we’ll be there eventually. We want to have a store in the (Winnipeg) marketplace and we know where we want to put it. It’s just going to take time,” said Rogers.

Polo Park general manager Deborah Green could not be reached for comment. St. Vital general manager Cheryl Mazur said while Simons would be a great addition for either mall, neither of them likely has room at the moment to accommodate a store that big.

“But I never say never because anything can change,” she added.

She agreed one possible option for St. Vital might be to add onto the existing mall. But if it did that, it would also have to build a parkade or an underground parking facility in order to replace the surface parking spaces that would be lost.

“With anything you do, you have to keep the ratio of parking,” she noted.

Another option might be to add a second floor to the mall, as Polo Park has done. But she said some retailers aren’t keen to be on the second floor of a mall.

Cadillac Fairview also co-owns the Plaza at Polo Park development along with Winnipeg’s Shindico Realty Inc.

Bob Downs, development manager for Shindico, has been trying to find a replacement tenant for the 107,000-square-foot former Target store since earlier this year, when the U.S.-based discount department store chain announced it was withdrawing from the Canadian market.

Downs said he wasn’t surprised Simons decided against leasing the former Target space.

“They’ve always wanted to be in a mall, and the conversations we had with them were to try and convince them they didn’t have to do that,” he explained.

“But so be it. We have a lot of respect for Simons and for Don Rogers, so we have to respect the decision that they made. We just have to go with the flow and keep working on the opportunities we have, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Downs said he’s in discussions with others who have expressed an interest in the former Target space. He wouldn’t say who they are or how many there are, but said he hopes to reach a deal within the next couple of months.

He said talks are also ongoing with several other parties who are interested in leasing space elsewhere in the development, which should have a total of about 350,000 square feet of retail and office space once fully developed.

With the closing of the Target store, it has no tenants at the moment.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca