CANADIAN TIRE ACQUIRES 12 TARGET LEASES FOR $17.7M, SUBJECT TO APPROVAL OF COURT

TORON TO • Canadian Tire Corp. has concluded an agreement to acquire 12 strategic real estate leases, formerly held by Target Canada, for $17.7 million, the company announced Wednesday. The transaction is subject to the approval of the court in connection with Target Canada’s CCAA proceedings. “We’ve been tracking certain Target properties for some time, and when the opportunity came up, we moved quickly and secured virtually all of them. We chose 12 properties that fit strategically and financially into our store network,” said Michael Medline, President and CEO, Canadian Tire. The 12 locations are cross-country, in suburbs or smaller urban centres: four in B.C., two in Ontario, three in Quebec, one each in Halifax, Winnipeg and Moncton. Target Canada announced in January it would shut all 133 of its Canadian stores, only two years after its highly anticipated launch north of the border. In March, Target Canada struck a deal to sell 11 properties to Oxford Properties Corp. and Ivanhoe Cambridge for $138 million before taxes. Target has been holding an auction of dozens of properties this week at the Toronto offices of Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, which represents Target, as part of its courtsupervised windup. Target was RioCan REIT’s seventh-largest tenant with 26 leases in Canada. The acquisition of the 12 leases allows Canadian Tire to improve profitability by providing a cost-effective means to improve its retail store network through right-sizing and replacing some of its existing stores to better locations. The 12 new locations will add approximately 400,000 square feet of retail space to Canadian Tire Retail’s store network.