It’s taken time, but the Anvil Centre office tower is filling up with tenants.
The City of New Westminster completed the $86.4 million Anvil Centre civic facility and office tower in the fall of 2014. In March 2014, the city announced it had sold the office tower to a company owned by businessmen Suki Sekhon of the CRS Group of Companies and Joseph Segal of Kingswood Capital Corporation.
In July 2017, Cushman & Wakefield, which is overseeing leasing of the building, confirmed the building’s first tenant. Evolution Gaming, an international online gaming company, will be leasing the 12th floor.
Douglas College has announced it will be leasing four floors in the building as a second campus in New Westminster. The college will lease 66,000 square feet on floors six, seven, eight and nine.
“We are basically 93 per cent leased now,” said Roger Leggatt of Cushman & Wakefield. “The Century Group has taken the 10th floor; they are a development company. Aerotek, which is like an HR staffing company, have taken about 5,000 square feet on the 11th floor. Land Titles and Survey Authority is on five.”
According to Leggatt, 10,000 square feet on the 11th floor is the remaining space to be leased.
Mayor Jonathan Cote said the city is pleased the Anvil Centre office tower is now 93 per cent leased and has five tenants.
“It is critically important to the City of New Westminster,” he said about having tenants in the building. “Although we had sold the office tower a number of years ago, one of the main objectives of the office tower being built in the first place was really to provide more employment opportunities and bring more vibrancy to downtown New Westminster. Definitely seeing the tower finally getting leased up is going to be able to see that component of that building start to fit the vision that we had for the area.”
In 2015, Sekhon told the Record there had been some “keen interest” in the office space, but the owners had a long-term vision and wanted to lease it up with quality tenants.
“You don’t want to put in tenants for the sake of putting them in,” he said. “We prefer to have a good tenant mix there.”
Leggatt said the owners’ patience has “certainly paid off” with regards to waiting for the right people and the right deals. Because it’s very difficult to find good-quality space on SkyTrain, he said it was just a matter of timing as to when the space would be leased.
“They have exceeded rent expectations. They have done very well at securing very good-quality tenants and all very long-term commitments for the building. They have achieved all of those goals,” he said. “Most of the commitments are 10 years or so.”
Cote said it took “a little bit longer than we had hoped” to secure the tenants, but the city knew the market would ultimately respond.
“I think the city took a very long-term view with this project and really wanted to make sure we were doing more than just building a community centre in downtown New Westminster, but really contributing to a larger vision of downtown New Westminster,” he said. “The activities are starting to get busier and busier inside the Anvil Centre community component as well. I think the building is really starting to fulfil the aspirations and the vision the city had originally intended when it was built
