Cornerstones
Duane Braaten, owner of real estate brokerage Advantage Real Estate Services Inc., believes that two developments in particular have been integral in making Prince Albert a destination for businesses, workers and residents of other northern communities.
Firstly, a crop of new auto dealers, including Mazda, Kia and Nissan, began arriving in the city five years ago (Braaten brokered the recent deal that saw Hyundai open here).
Now, Prince Albert has almost the same amount of vehicle variety for northern shoppers as Saskatoon does.
The second and more significant development is the 80-acre Cornerstone commercial area on the east side of the city.
Edmonton-based Springwood Land Development Corp. first began developing Cornerstone's north side in 2001.
The north side includes Wal-Mart, Future Shop, Sobeys, Rona and a number of other name-brand retailers found at big-box power centres throughout Canada.
The southern side of Cornerstone is now being developed, with a Prince Albert Co-op food store, Royal Bank, Michaels craft store and Original Joe's among the new or slated tenants.
"Cornerstone has confirmed that we are now a regional shopping centre," said Braaten, who brokered the deal that saw Co-op move into Cornerstone. He has also been involved in the sale or lease of a number of other Cornerstone spaces.
"Initially I thought Cornerstone would be bad for the community [because] you see longtime businesses being gobbled up by the big nationals," said Braaten. "But now you're finding that people from Nipawin, Melfort, Tisdale and Rosthern are [shopping] here instead of going to Saskatoon."
According to Springwood, the value of new developments in Cornerstone in 2011 is more than $19.5 million and includes around 114,000 square feet of new commercial space.
A number of businesses that were once located downtown have moved to Cornerstone, raising concerns about the hollowing out of the core (commercial vacancy downtown stands at roughly 10 per cent).
Vacant buildings aside, downtown Prince Albert, for many people, conjures up images of panhandlers and vagrants.
The Prince Albert Downtown Improvement District Association, which began a downtown rejuvenation plan in 2005, paints a rosier picture of that area, saying that new businesses are giving the area a more "eclectic, pedestrian-friendly" feel.
"Downtown has a lot of opportunity, but it's an area that we need to work on," said Yves Richard, the city's planning manager.
Finding more land
As of mid-May, the city had issued 16 per cent more building permits compared with the same time last year, and double that of 2009.
Also as of mid-May, there was a 74 per cent increase in the number of new business licences issued in Prince Albert from the same time frame in 2010 and a 132 per cent increase over the same period in 2009.
Prince Albert has not experienced this much activity since the late 1980s.
Kevin Wouters, president of the Prince Albert and District Association of Realtors, said that retail space remains hard to come by, with space at Cornerstone scooped up as soon as it becomes available.
"We were underpriced and now there is demand for it," he said. "Being tight on space is a good problem as long as it doesn't get out of hand."
The most difficult land to find in Prince Albert today is industrial, which has a vacancy rate near zero.
An October 2010 study commissioned by Prince Albert to examine an increase in the development levy found that 25 years from now, the city will face an industrial land deficit of anywhere from 80 acres to 402 acres, depending on the growth scenario.
City Hall has identified 338 acres to the south east that are to be annexed by the city, likely this fall.
Once the annexation occurs, the city will face the challenge of coming up with the capital needed to service the new lands (phase 1 will see 30 acres of the annexed land serviced for light-industrial use). A development levy of $98,372 per hectare was recommended in the third-party report that the city commissioned last October.
That's an increase from $48,185 per hectare in the West Hill area of the city and an increase from a city-wide (excluding West Hill) levy of $29,035 per hectare.
The city is also opening an eco-industrial park in the fall, where it hopes to create a critical mass of biofuel, biomass and other clean-energy developers.
Retiring residents
Wouters said that the average sale price of a home in Prince Albert has doubled in the last five years, sparking new developments.
The 63-acre Lakeview Estates will be made up of condos and single-family homes. After a month on the market, 11 of the 26 houses being built in phase 1 were sold.
Garry Miller, a Prince Albert real estate agent and a co-owner of Lakeview, said that buyers are mostly local retirees.
The Adanac Pointe development is not a gated community like Lakeview, but its developers call it the first "architecturally planned" neighbourhood in Prince Albert. With 72 residential lots, prices range from $400,000 to $1 million. The 20 lots in the first phase are 80 per cent sold.
Doug Patrick, who is developing Adanac Pointe and is also the incoming chairman of the Prince Albert & District Chamber Of Commerce, noted, though, that Prince Albert must depend not on retirees but younger workers in order to achieve its full potential.
from Western Investor September 2011
