Canberra House tenants have been advised they will likely have to find new homes because the Civic building's owners are considering redeveloping the site. Canberra House, opposite the Melbourne Building, is home to several retailers, including the Wig and Pen pub and the Canberra Club, which was formed in 1931.
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The building is owned by property investment company Prime Space, who also have an office in Canberra House.
Building manager Colliers' ACT director of real estate management, Rupert Cullen, said he had been talking with the tenants about the issue over the past fortnight.
“I have had informal conversations with the majority of retail tenants and indicated that there was a possibility that there will be a development, but no decision has been made,” he said.
It is not clear at this stage when tenants would have to move out.
One retailer in the building, optical store Vision City, said the move wasn't fair on the tenants.
‘‘It’s big business wanting an extra dollar for more office space and saying, ‘well too bad for all the little guys’," the proprietor's son Adam Skelton told The Canberra Times.
‘‘We have nowhere to go, we haven’t got any place locked down.
‘‘There’s a decent vacancy rate in the city, the rents people are asking for are absolutely exorbitant.’’
The building manager said most tenants on the ground floor – largely retail businesses – had clauses added to their contracts in recent years, giving building owners Prime Space “flexibility” if it chose to redevelop the building.
The Canberra Club is on higher floors, where there is also office space. These leases were “slightly different”.
Mr Cullen said a project team was looking at the potential for redevelopment and his conversations were “getting that information to the tenants and saying it is being looked at, so tenants need to look at their terms and conditions and understand their position”.
“We are bound by that [terms and conditions] and not looking to move out of that,” he said.
There is speculation that the owners want to build a 12-storey office block on the site, although Mr Cullen said Prime Space had told him that no decisions had been made.
“There has been a certain amount of speculation within the tenants. The rumour mill has been running,” he said.
Canberra House was completed in 1975, and Prime Space's website calls the building "an icon on the western City fringe of Canberra".
In addition to the ground floor retailers and the Canberra Club, the building is currently home to a number of legal businesses, including Clayton Utz, Dibbs Barker and Bradley Allen, according to the company's website.
Prime Space purchased the building in February 2010 in joint venture with the Canberra Club, and in late 2010 received a final assessment on the change of use charge, which would allow for an increase of floor area on the site from 14,000sqm to approximately 50,000sqm including residential.
with John Thistleton
