Three New Tenants Coming To Moncton’s Granite Centre
MONCTON – The developers behind Moncton’s Granite Center hope its three new tenants will soon be fully moved into a new as they finish work on the outside of the building.
Trevor MacLeod is the president of the Gray Group, the firm behind the Granite Centre. He told Huddle he expects Harvest Fresh Eats, Blaze Pizza (an American pizza chain whose backers include NBA star Lebron James), and Subway to be moved in and doing fit-up work for their businesses as contractors with RCS Construction carry out as exterior work on the new, 6,000-square-foot building.
“They’re moving along quite well there. We’re just wrapping up their base building construction on Plaza 3 there now, with the intention of doing some co-tenancy,” MacLeod said.
“All three tenants should be getting underway with their fit-up work immediately. I’m not sure what their dates or timelines are for opening but I think the three of them should be getting to work in the next couple of weeks.”
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Plaza 3 is one of several buildings that are part of the Granite Center development, near Costco – its anchor tenant – just off Elmwood Drive and the Trans-Canada Highway.
More than half of the Granite Centre property has been spoken for by businesses looking to move in, and the development has been unofficially dubbed “the Dartmouth Crossing of New Brunswick, with about 300,000 square feet of commercial space.
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The three new tenants moving into Plaza 3 are maintaining a trend of food-sector businesses taking up residence in the complex.
“We’ve quickly become a bit of a QSR hub there, with, you know, eight restaurants that are either open or are going to open in the near future,” said MacLeod.
Blaze Franchisee Irwin Dawson confirmed to Huddle in July that the custom pizza chain will be firing up its ovens for the first time in Moncton sometime either in late winter or early spring.
Harvest Clean Eats co-founder and CEO Connor Stoilov confirmed the health food chain’s plans to take up residence in the same space as Blaze in the coming months.
“If all goes to plan, we will be open the first week of November, which is super exciting for the Moncton market,” Stoilov wrote in an email to Huddle. Stoilov was unavailable for further comment before the publication deadline of this story.
McLeod said the usual culprits of supply chain issues and labour shortages have pushed back timelines for Plaza 3.
“Needless to say, construction costs and timelines have gone up significantly over the last year to two years. As far as we know, things are moving smoothly on their end,” he said of the three businesses moving to Plaza Three.
MacLeod said it’d be difficult to guesstimate a deadline for a completed Plaza 3 at this point.
“I would assume that early in the new year, they’d have all three locations open,” he noted.
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Plaza 3 won’t mark the end of the work at the Granite Centre. MacLeod said there are plans in the works for an additional building, dubbed Plaza 6.
He said there are plans to pre-lease spaces in the 15,000-square-foot strip mall and that they could be putting shovels in the ground by the spring.
“We’re gearing that towards doing smaller spaces, like 1,200-square-foot options for retail tenants,” he said.
MacLeod said that with Costco serving as a “shadow anchor,” and given the fact that the development began shortly before Covid-19 first hit, there is potential for more growth and more businesses to come to the area.
“As you get more tenants in and more buildings open the traffic generation increases – there’s more interest,” he said. “There’s more interest from local and national tenants and quite a few market candidates in our development. That’s what we pride ourselves on bringing new options to Moncton that didn’t exist before.”
MacLeod said that the original plan was to develop the Granite Centre in about a ten-year timeline. He said that with some land banked, the company can increase the size of the Granite Center.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said.
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].