eKourier Oct 2019

FEATURE

NEW CENTRE OPENS IN MELBOURNE’S NORTH

The recent competition and opening of our new Thomastown centre is another fantastic addition to our Melbourne network.

I t was recently revealed that Melbourne’s population is about to tip over five million people and is growing at 2.5% a year. This equates to 2,300 people moving in to Melbourne every week. In contrast, constrained Sydney has 5.2 million people and is growing at 1.8% a year. This means the growth of Melbourne is a very exciting wave to ride and keeping pace is a challenge. Our new centre in Thomastown is a blend of an obsolete bulky goods retail building conversion and new purpose- built storage buildings and retail office. The building has been vacant for many years as demand for retail space shifted to other areas, then the idea of re-purposing the property into self storage emerged. There was 7,000 square metres of obsolete retail floor area and hundreds of unused car parking spaces. Working with the property owner, Les Smith, we developed an innova- tive way to adaptively re-use the retail structures, utilise dormant parking while maximising exposure to Settle- ment Road with a brand new office. After a tortured approval process

that involved an expensive and time-consuming appeal at the Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), consent was finally achieved in 2017. Built by Hutchinsons, the project was delivered two weeks ahead of schedule. We opened the centre with 6,600 square metres of rentable space, and 628 spaces, including 30 open spaces. Thomastown is our 13th Melbourne location and is run by Kailiam Hood (Centre Manager) and Samantha Bezzina (Assistant Manager). The Thomastown centre will soon

be followed by one in Truganina in Melbourne’s west, where work has commenced. Later in 2020, we hope to also add Craigieburn and Cranbourne North, with others hopefully coming soon too.

Sam Kennard Chief Executive Officer

3 Kennards Kourier Oct 2019