Developers have long complained to the city that this not the best use of land and this is why the store fronts are vacant. Retailers, in turn, say the developers need to start building quality product and the tenants will come.
What retailers know, and residential developers haven't fully understood yet, storefronts need a different approach. All too often developers build residential style condo store fronts. This leads to the following:
- inefficient loading and delivery capability
- hard to store garbage
- low signage height (need 16')
- residents not liking certain uses (bars and restaurants)
- too many columns within the space
- not environmentally friendly to keep costs down (i.e. LEED certification)
- low ceiling heights
- not enough parking
Take Lanterra joint venturing with Cadillac Fairview to add office, a hotel, restaurants, retail shopping and a grocery store to Maple Leaf Square. The differing demands caused significant construction overruns, which they have now learned to deal with for the future, but has made the development successful.
With the Peter Freed and Minto project coming up at Bathurst and Front starting with attracting quality retail in mind, its evident that developers are starting to catch on.
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4 comments:
Good article and an important issue. Condoization of retail (square peg in a round hole) contributes to spaces like The Met (Yonge and Carlton) and The Verve (Wellesley and Jarvis) having empty retails spaces for YEARS after the condos are completed and residents have moved in. Something has gone wrong if you've got a few thousand upwardly mobile consumers sitting on top of an empty retail box that no retailer wants to lease. On the flip side, developers like Canderel (College Park, DNA buildings) seemed to have figured something out as their units are mostly leased by A1 retailers like Starbucks, pizza pizza, and BMO.
The blog features on why the retail of condos in the city of Toronto have taken a drastic change and not proved to be successful. A must read to keep yourself upto the mark.
In Toroto there is retail at the baseof condos. The author has expalined the reasons behind it
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Toronto Condo Investment
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