Sussex shop emptied by rent hike still vacant
Bookstore closed after NCC said lease price would nearly double
Nine months after Nicholas Hoare’s Sussex Drive bookstore closed because the National Capital Commission wanted to nearly double its rent, the storefront remains empty.
“The NCC is currently in negotiations with interested parties,” said spokesman Cédric Pelletier. “The location itself is popular.”
At the same time, he said, the commission is “not in a position to provide a timeline” for when it might be rented. The NCC intends to find a tenant who’ll pay market rent, though Pelletier wouldn’t specify what that might be.
A flyer from Colliers, the commercial real-estate company, invites tenants to rent the space at 419 Sussex Dr. for about $6,500 a month to start, just more than Nicholas Hoare was paying as it ended its tenancy.
“It was a little more than $6,000, all-in,” said Hoare last week from his warehouse in Montreal. “They wanted to raise it 72 per cent immediately and have it rise to a 93-per-cent increase by the end of five years. ... You should never take a lease that goes up that much.”
The NCC has never confirmed the terms it was offering except to say that it made a business decision to charge market rent, but a 72-percent increase to a $6,000 monthly rent would have had the store paying $10,320 a month by now. Pelletier again declined last week to confirm or deny Hoare’s numbers. The NCC wanted market rent then and it wants market rent now, he said.
Colliers’ flyer shows pictures of the shop with its custom wood shelves removed and deep grooves left on the grey carpet. The location boasts 2,583 square feet, a fireplace and views of Parliament Hill.
Hoare is still angry about the way his relationship with the NCC broke down. He and the commission were good for each other, he said, with the bookstore providing an anchor for a stretch of Sussex that doesn’t have much retail activity.
“They were extremely keen to have us,” he said. “They sought us out, not the other way around.” The rent hike left him feeling “betrayed,” he said.
Another frustration was the commission’s insistence on a lease of just a few years: the custom shelves and lights and other accoutrements the store had, so essential to its boutique atmosphere, were expensive and Hoare wanted a long lease to amortize the cost.
He has a 20-year lease for his store in Toronto, he said, but the NCC wouldn’t ordinarily agree to more than three years at a time in Ottawa.
These are challenging times for independent bookstores all around, with the rise of online retailers such as Amazon a second blow after big stores such as Chapters moved in — in Hoare’s case, just down the road at Rideau and Sussex.
Hoare closed the Ottawa store last April and was going to close his Montreal-area shop at the same time, but kept it open several months longer after the mayor of Westmount interceded and Hoare negotiated a temporary new lease. That ultimately failed as well, though, and the store closed for good at the end of 2012, leaving only the store in Toronto.