Edmonton City Centre mall owner goes into receivership

Madeline Smith · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 09, 2025 8:03 PM EDT | Last Updated: 7 minutes ago

The institution that owns Edmonton City Centre promenade and 3 attached bureau towers successful the downtown halfway is successful receivership.

A tribunal bid granted connected Monday enactment accounting steadfast PricewaterhouseCoopers successful complaint of managing and operating assets owned by Edmonton City Centre Inc. That includes the mall, TD Tower, 102A Tower, Centre Point Place and gathering parkades — successful total, astir 1.4 cardinal quadrate feet of bureau and retail space.

Montreal-based commercialized real-estate lender Otéra Capital Inc. filed a connection of assertion past week seeking the receivership order.

According to the filing, Edmonton City Centre owes Otéra astir $140 cardinal nether recognition agreements struck successful August 2019.

The connection of assertion alleges Edmonton City Centre defaulted connected the presumption of 2 loans, with an archetypal nonaccomplishment to marque a required outgo successful December 2024, followed by further missing payments. Otéra agreed to clasp disconnected connected taking further enactment until July 1, but aft making a last request for the outstanding amounts, filed a suit connected July 2.

In a ineligible little outlining arguments for the receivership order, Otéra representatives said City Centre is simply a "complex property" that needs progressive absorption by a receiver during the income process.

"Otéra's information needs extortion and safeguarding from discarded due to the fact that City Centre is not being decently funded and maintained," the little says.

In a connection to CBC, a typical for LaSalle Asset Management — 1 of the named beneficial owners of Edmonton City Centre — said, "Unprecedented marketplace shifts successful caller years person created unsocial challenges for this property.

"We've worked intimately with each parties, including our investors and lender, to find the champion imaginable resolution. Edmonton City Centre remains unfastened and committed to providing work to each its visitors."

Edmonton City Centre has mislaid respective ample tenants successful caller years — Hudson's Bay unopen down its store successful 2020, and Sport Chek pulled retired successful 2023. A erstwhile Coles bookstore determination besides shuttered successful 2022, but a caller Revolver determination precocious opened successful its erstwhile space, selling records, movies and popular civilization items.

CBC Edmonton is besides a tenant successful Edmonton City Centre.

Mall cardinal to 'trajectory of downtown'

Edmonton Downtown Business Association CEO Puneeta McBryan said quality of the receivership isn't needfully a astonishment to radical who unrecorded and enactment downtown.

"We cognize that the plus owners person been beauteous stretched for immoderate time," she said.

Challenges bringing radical and businesses backmost to downtown Edmonton aft the COVID pandemic are thing new, particularly arsenic a important information of the downtown workforce began moving from location astatine slightest portion of the week.

But McBryan said struggles for Edmonton City Centre started earlier, with the January 2020 closure of Holt Renfrew successful Manulife Place, which is connected to the mall.

Many downtown buying centres crossed the state are struggling, McBryan said. But successful Edmonton, there's conscionable excessively overmuch retail abstraction for the existent size of the downtown population.

"So we request to bash 2 things: We request to rapidly turn our population, which we're moving connected trying to get much residential built, but apt besides demolish oregon repurpose a immense information of our retail."

The Edmonton City Centre spot stretches from 101st to 103rd Street successful betwixt 103rd and 102nd Avenue. At the intersection of 2 LRT lines, with Rogers Place conscionable to the northbound and Churchill Square, the Winspear Centre, Citadel Theatre and Art Gallery of Alberta nearby, it's a consequential portion of downtown.

"It's this benignant of partition close present astatine the centre of our downtown. And what happens successful the promenade is inextricably tied to the trajectory of our downtown," McBryan said.

"I deliberation whoever comes next, whoever buys the plus … we're each crossing our fingers that that happens soon, and it's idiosyncratic with a truly bully plan.

They should bring successful an adept and truly enactment unneurotic a strategy that reimagines this spot for what our downtown truly needs and what the marketplace volition really support."