The Anvil Centre office tower hasn’t signed a deal with any tenants but has had some “keen interest” in the space.
Last March, the City of New Westminster announced it had sold the office tower atop Anvil Centre to a company owned by businessmen Suki Sekhon of the CRS Group of Companies and Joseph Segal of Kingswood Capital Corporation. The building includes 137,000 square feet of Class A office space.
Sekhon told The Record there’s been some “keen interest” in the office space.
“We have some offers out there on different areas of different floors, some proposals,” Sekhon said. “Some of them we are negotiating with. We have nothing that is firm.”
Sekhon said the owners have always known it was going to be a one- or two-year run to get most of the building filled with tenants.
“This is a long-term vision,” he said. “This is something we want to get leased up with a quality tenant. You don’t want to put in tenants for the sake of putting them in. We prefer to have a good tenant mix there.”
The owners are looking for professional tenants that could include lawyers, unions or a banking firm. Sekhon couldn’t put a date on when tenants could move into the building.
“It could be a day, it could be a month, it could be a year,” he said. “I don’t have a crystal ball.”
Currently, much of the interior of the Anvil Centre office building is a shell and hasn’t been finished.
“We are working on a show suite on the 14th floor and maybe finishing off the 12th,” Sekhon said. “Right now the only finished area is the lobby area and the decks.”
According to Sekhon, the City of New Westminster is holding an event on the 14th floor of the office tower in February.
“I think for the 14th, because it is a unique floor, we want to show what it would look like finished,” he said of the building’s top floor. “I think we are going to spend some money and some time there, we are going to put some furniture in the lobby. We are going to invest some money so when people come through they can look at it and say, ‘this is a finished space.’”
The city was originally working with the Uptown Property Group on the office tower, but after it pulled out of the project the city decided to build it on its own. The Anvil Centre and office tower project cost $86.4 million, which was $1.9 million over what the city had budgeted.
Under the terms of the sale of the office tower, the purchasers are paying for the office tower in instalments. After putting down a $5 million non-refundable deposit upon signing the purchase and sale agreement, the purchasers provided an additional $5 million in December 2014, when the sale closed (and held back another $1.5 million until some construction deficiencies are addressed.) The remaining money will be paid to the city, with interest, within three years of the Dec. 31, 2014 closing date.
Although the office tower was initially marketed as Merchant Square, it’s since undergone a name change.
“Is called Anvil Centre,” Sekhon said. “Why would you have two different names? I didn’t like the idea of Merchant Square at Anvil Centre. It made more sense to have everything under one name.”
