For sale: building at iconic location

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/12/2016 (3337 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A piece of Winnipeg’s most iconic corner — Portage and Main — is up for grabs.

Scotiabank has put its five-storey office building on the southwest corner of the intersection on the market. The property is being sold on an “unpriced” basis.

The bank has owned the 81,890-square-foot building since it was built in 1979. It’s one of the last few chartered banks that still owns real estate on the corner. Most of the others lease space in one of the four high-rise towers at or near the intersection.

It’s selling its building because in 2018, a good chunk of its operations will be relocating to leased space in one of the True North Square (TNS) office/retail towers under construction on Graham Avenue. So it will no longer need all of that space at Portage and Main.

“Following our announcement in February 2016 that we will consolidate our Winnipeg-based Commercial Banking and Scotia Wealth office space and add a new Scotiabank branch at True North Square, we have made the decision to sell the building we own at Portage & Main,” it stated in an email.

“We plan to lease the space from the new owner of the building to keep our main Winnipeg branch at this prominent intersection. We look forward renovating that branch to provide our customers with the most up-to-date tools and services.”

Ken Yee, senior vice-president for real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, said Wednesday there should be plenty of investors, both locally and out-of-province, who will be interested in acquiring the property.

“Given that this is a generational opportunity to acquire this iconic property at the intersection of Portage and Main, we expect collective interest from existing stakeholders, opportunistic investors from out of province, and local owner users,” Yee said. “It will be a prized acquisition.”

He said any firms who want to acquire the property for their own use will not only be getting a high-profile building, but one that offers all of the “must-have” amenities that help employers attract and retain workers in today’s competitive workplace environment.

He said there is also continued investor interest in well-located downtown office buildings. The fact the Scotiabank Building is quite a bit smaller than the four high-rise office towers in the area should also make it attractive to a larger pool of prospective buyers.

‘We expect collective interest from existing stakeholders, opportunistic investors from out of province, and local owner users. It will be a prized acquisition’ 

Yee noted this is also a good time to acquire a quality building because the downtown office market is on the cusp of what he describes as a generational shift.

“Class A rates at Portage and Main have historically laboured in the mid-teen range for decades, and because of the development of next-generation new office buildings, Centrepoint firstly and now True North Square, the new watermarks for Class A spiked to mid-twenties per square foot at Centrepoint and considerably higher at TNS,” he explained.

“So we see a significant delta forming between the new next-generation buildings and the Class A towers at Portage and Main. We see an opportunity for investors and/or owner-users to capitalize on the timing of this upward trend in rental rates with a high profile property.”

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca