Just over two years after ceremonial shovels turned the dirt and more than nine years since it was planned, the first commercial tenants have opened their doors at Omicron’s $100 million Eagle Creek development in View Royal.
On Tuesday, Tim Hortons opened for business, with Subway and Coast Capital Insurance set to open today.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Peter Laughlin, Omicron’s director on Vancouver Island.
“It’s a pretty exciting time, and it’s been a team effort to get here.”
Omicron has a steady schedule of openings through the rest of this month at the four-hectare site, with Western Financial opening Feb. 15, and Quality Foods and Cobs Bread on Feb. 25.
The YM-YWCA has set April 1 as its opening date.
For Quality Foods, the new 45,000-square-foot location marks its 12th Island store and second in Greater Victoria. The company opened its Langford location in July 2014.
“We’re very excited to expand our unique brand of grocery retailing to residents of View Royal and the surrounding communities,” said co-founder Ken Schley. “Eagle Creek Village is destined to be an active hub for the area, and we’re thrilled to be the grocery store for this vibrant multi-use development.”
Laughlin said the other commercial tenants filling the more than 110,000 square feet of retail space have not yet set opening dates, though several others, including Cascadia Liquor and Forbes Pharmacy, are lined up this spring.
Other tenant announcements will come over the next two weeks, he said.
“There’s not much that isn’t leased,” Laughlin said. “We will have the majority of the project open by the end of May.
The first phase of the multi-use project will also include 75,000 square feet of medical professional office space and 60 units of residential rental suites.
This summer, Omicron is expected to break ground on the second phase of the project, 100 condominiums at the north end of the development.
Eagle Creek has found a nice spot in the market, according to Graham Smith, senior vice-president of Colliers International.
“Eagle Creek is a neighbourhood-centre type of development. It has the office component driven by the location next to the hospital and what you see there are the typical neighbourhood retailers — the food store, drug store and coffee guy,” Smith said. “If you look at the tenant mix, there are a lot of the usual suspects because they don’t have a location nearby.”
Because it’s neighbourhood-focused, Eagle Creek will have little effect on retail vacancy rates in other areas of the city, but Smith argues even Uptown and Mayfair’s influence on places such as the downtown core has dwindled.
“I’m not convinced they have as much effect on the downtown. I believe the biggest effect on our core is tourism,” Smith said. “When we got The Gap and Eddie Bauer, they came to Government Street not because there were people living nearby, it was to take advantage of tourist traffic.”
With tourism numbers improving in the last two years and an increase in the number of people living downtown, the retail outlook for the core seems bright. “Last year, we could feel the momentum shifting in terms of our lease-up in downtown, not with the big guys but smaller, local, interesting tenants coming in,” said Smith. “That’s meant some interesting eateries, some good retail concepts, and that’s what drives a population. Big international brands you can find at any mall don’t pull people to the core.”
According to Colliers’ research, last year, the downtown street front vacancy rate dropped to 8.5 per cent from 10.2 per cent in 2014, a trend Smith expects could hold again this year.
As for the major shopping centres, Smith expects there could be some better news on the horizon after a year that saw vacancy rates increase slightly to 5.18 per cent from 4.97 per cent in 2014. He said shopping centres such as Uptown, Mayfair and Hillside have a tough game to play as they are all chasing a limited stable of tenants interested in the Victoria market.
