New £7m Dundee car showroom to open next month

A NEW multimillion-pound car dealership, constructed on the site of Dundee’s historic Valentines card factory, will open its doors next month.

Peter Vardy Group has spent more than £7 million redeveloping the brownfield site at Dunsinane Industrial Estate.

The showroom, extending to more than 70,000 square feet, is the group’s second CarStore concept outlet and one of the country’s l argest i ndividual motor dealerships with space for more than 500 cars.

The group is now expecting to begin trading at the site next month and has recruited more than 70 staff in a variety of sales and administrative posts.

Peter Vardy, chief executive of the group, said the Dundee outlet was designed as a “destination dealership”.

“Work on our state-ofthe-art Dundee CarStore is well under way, and we can’t wait till May 13 to throw open our doors to the car-buying public of Dundee,” Mr Vardy said.

“Providing the east coast of Scotland with a destination dealership of this scale and quality is something I have wanted to do for a while.”

Details of sales targets for the site have not been made public, but the group’s flagship Hillington CarStore in Glasgow, the site which i nspired the design f or t he Dundee building, sold about 3,500 cars in its first year in operation and 4,000 in its second full year — a rate of more than 10 per day.

The i nv e s t m e n t in Dundee comes j ust 11 years after t he official launch of Peter Vardy Ltd with t he acquisition of Perth Vauxhall in May 2006.

The group has since grown rapidly, with the Dundee site being t he group’s 12th car retail lot.

Its wider network includes dealerships i n Per th, Kirkcaldy and Dalgety Bay in Fife.