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News Story
SmartCentres proposes retail, office space for old Laurentian High School

By Peter Kovessy, Ottawa Business Journal Staff
Tue, Sep 15, 2009 12:00 PM EST

A major Canadian retail developer is asking the city to rezone the site of a former Nepean school so it can build roughly 301,600 square feet of retail and office space, according to a city report.

By comparison, that is more than twice the size of the retail development anchored by Canadian Tire at Carling Avenue and the Queensway.

The first phase of SmartCentres' development of the former Laurentian High School, located at the northwest intersection of Baseline Road and Clyde Avenue, near Merivale Road, would be a single standalone 99,028-square-foot retail store in the northeast corner of the 15.37-acre site.

The remainder of the property would be framed by buildings one to three storeys in height along Baseline Road and Clyde Avenue, with the upper floors featuring approximately 82,020 square feet of office space. The site would contain 219,600 square feet of total retail space, according to the report being tabled at next Tuesday's planning and environment committee meeting.

Outside the downtown core, the area features one of the city's tightest retail space markets.

At mid-year, there was a paltry 2.5 per cent retail vacancy rate along the Merivale corridor in Nepean, according to commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield LePage.

SmartCentres purchased the property from the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board for $21.26 million in 2005.

Planning documents drafted by Lloyd Phillips & Associates Ltd. for SmartCentres a year ago say residential developers were contacted about the property. However, their response was either disinterest or an insistence on an unacceptable business arrangement due to highly differing land values, according to SmartCentres, which says it wants to eventually include residential uses for the site, but will focus on retail, service, and office uses in the short term.