'It a real pain': Year on and significant CBD building remains empty
“It has been a real pain actually. It eats its head off because you are still paying rates to the council who flogged our tenant.”
A year on from the Farmers department store vacating its previous Dee St site the Invercargill building remains empty. Although the building owner is still confident he will get it filled.
In July last year nation-wide retail chain Farmers moved from Dee St to Esk St as part of the new Invercargill Central development.
It left the double-story 150 Dee St building - owned by the Thompson Property Group - largely empty.
Managing director Gaire Thompson said they have been working hard to get the building back being used but confirmed at this point they still haven’t got anything locked in.
He said there were interested parties though and remained hopeful to get something sorted.
The Nelson-based commercial property owner is in Invercargill this week and is meeting with an interested party in the building.
“It has been a real pain actually. It eats its head off because you are still paying rates to the council who flogged our tenant,” Thompson said, when asked about the building being empty for so long.
“Our original scheme was to leave the escalator in there and have a mall-type thing in there, but there doesn’t seem to be the same amount of interest from the smaller tenants as there is with the bulk retail ones.”
It will require a significant amount of work to remove the escalator which is now likely to happen.
In April Thompson confirmed a potential buyer had shown interest but four months on nothing has eventuated.
Meanwhile, Thompson was a vocal opponent in the lead up to the Invercargill Central development going ahead.
In fact, at one point, he filed an injunction with the High Court at Invercargill to halt demolition work on at the block bordered by Dee, Tay, Kelvin and Esk Sts.
Thompson's main concern at the time was around the Invercargill City Council not notifying the public of an application by HWCP Ltd to vary the conditions of resource consents for the demolition, alteration and development of a block.
The injunction was eventually lifted.
Thompson confirmed he has visited the development since it opened and does like it.
“I think they’ve got it looking nice, which is great. Instead of a bland wall down Esk St you’ve got shop frontages and things that look nice, which is good.
“A lot of those developments are ugly with blank walls, and that does nothing for the town, but they have gone to the effort of providing a bit of variety around the frontages.
“They have got a lot of tenants in there, so that’s good.”
Thompson said his issue all along was that he did not believe the development should have involved ratepayer money and instead should have been left to the private sector.
That view hasn’t changed, Thompson said.
Although throughout the process it was said the development would not have gone ahead to the extent it has without the Invercargill City Council stumping up.
There are good reasons why councils should stay out of commercial development and becoming landlords rather than being the conduit to assisting those prepared to make the investment. And this is one of those times when the water gets murky when the council as landlord is working to attract tenants from places where other private landlords are paying the same council commercial rates.
In every business decision there should be somewhere where the buck stops but with councils that doesn't happen. How many times do we hear of cost over runs and the old adage, we just have to move on and learn from our mistakes. Businesses can't do that.
It is a hard one because something needed to happen in our CBD after years of poor town planning going away back to letting the Warehouse set up out of the then recognised shopping area and we are still seeing a fragmented approach to the big picture CBD planning that is needed. H&Js will leave another big hole and if the city centre group attract tenants from along Dee Street to the north we will end up with a nice inner city with an empty looking surrounding.
Its a little like the proposal to develop Donovan Park on the outskirts of the now residential area while the housing stock closer to town ages and with nothing being done.
We once had a company set up called Invercargill Properties Ltd by the council and many councilors of the time did very nicely out of becoming directors and squeezing money out of it but that now seems to have become redundant. At the very least the council should be producing financial reports that the ratepayers as shareholders can peruse, for any commercial enterprise they invest public monies into.
Best move farmers made