Step forward for Centre Block
Posted Sep 7, 2010 02:50:04 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ground has been broken on a sales office that will drive growth in downtown Kitchener. Representatives from Andrin Homes, the City of Kitchener and the Downtown BIA were on-hand at a ceremony Tuesday morning that marked the beginning of construction on what will become a dedicated, 3,500-square-foot sales pavilion.
“The sales centre itself will have two, fully furnished model suites,” says Anne Marchildon, vice-president, Sales and Marketing with Andrin Homes. “The exterior of the sales centre (will also be) representative of what the building will look like, (from the) brick colour, the panel colours, the window details, all of that sort of thing.”
The sales centre will also include a 2,000-square-foot presentation area with multimedia capabilities to allow potential buyers to go through the project step-by-step.
Marchildon calls Kitchener a “very good” municipality to work with.
“They’re very forward-thinking, they do their homework, everybody is looking to the same objective,” she says.
Kitchener’s Director of Economic Development, Rod Regier, is admittedly excited by this next step in the project.
“It’s coming at the right time,” he says. “We’ve had some great announcements in the downtown recently with The Tannery and The Communitech Hub developed there, followed by the Google move. So we’re very excited about where this fits into the overall constellation.”
Regier says the next step is to get more people living in the downtown and he believes Tuesday’s announcement is a positive move in that direction.
Centre Block has sat dormant for almost a decade after the city learned of plans for a pornographic movie theatre and began buying up property. To date, Kitchener has spent about $9-million acquiring lands in the area bounded by King, Young, Duke and Ontario streets. Previous efforts to develop the property, including a potential relocation of the Main Branch of the Kitchener Public Library, have failed.
Not this time, says Regier.
“I’m really confident,” he enthuses. “They’ve (Andrin) got a great sales team, a great marketing team and all of the other pieces of the puzzle are coming together in the downtown. This is exactly the kind of project that will benefit from a commitment by the region to develop a rapid transit system.”
Marchildon shares the city’s enthusiasm about the project.
“We have a lot of people registered on our website, I get e-mails from people asking ‘when is it coming, when is it coming.’ There are a number of social media sites that we also follow where they talk about architecture and projects and that sort of thing so we know there’s a lot of interest in the project.”
If the fall is favourable in terms of construction weather, Andrin expects to have the sales centre open by year’s end.
And is Marchildon confident that Andrin can meet the presale objective of 80 per cent in order to satisfy the banks so they, in turn, can fund the construction?
“Oh yes,” she says. “Yes.”
