Montreal’s Royalmount Mall, a $7 billion enclosed luxury shopping centre that opened recently, is just the first step in developer Andrew Lutfy's plans for the project in a densely populated area just west of downtown Montreal.
The mall, at 824,000 square feet and a decade in the making, is slated to be joined by five office towers, a hotel, and additional retail space as well as housing if the Carbonleo chief executive gets his way.
Roughly half of the 170 boutiques and 60 restaurants in the first phase of the Royalmount Mall began serving customers in the past week, a short delay from its initial opening date of Aug. 15 . The remainder of the retail outlets are expected to open in the coming weeks and months.
The mall is currently 93% leased, according to owner Carbonleo, and retailers include Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Versace, Saint Laurent, Jimmy Choo, Longchamp, RH, Moncler, Zara, Nike, Garage, Browns, Mango, Sandro, Maje, Anine Bing, Alo Yoga and Veronica Beard.
Carbonleo, a development company controlled by Lutfy, has some retail skin in the Royalmount Mall with an 8,000-square-foot Dynamite store, a popular clothing chain where Lutfy launched his career as a stock clerk in 1982 before rising to chief executive officer.
Lutfy’s Carbonleo is also financing a large flagship beauty store known as Rennaï that plans to offer beauty products and other related services.
No shortage of high-end vendors
The mall has no shortage of high-end watch and jewelry vendors, including outlets of Tiffany and Co., David Yurman, TAG Heuer, Tudor, IWC, Omega, Montblanc, and TimeVallée. The shopping centre is also set to contain the largest Rolex boutique in Canada.
The food court has been dubbed Le Fou Fou and contains about 900 indoor seats and another 400 outdoor seats. The food mall is set to offer a dozen dining options as well as four bars and in-house catering. It is also slated to contain a large-scale aquarium to be completed around 2026.
Carbonleo has planned the current retail operation as the first of several development stages. Plans call for several additions to the site, including a luxury hotel on the southern flank and five office towers on the northern end.
Lutfy said the towers would be A-class downtown structures, similar to 1000 De La Gauchetière W. and the new National Bank headquarters.
"Some say the office sector is the worst commercial real estate sector these days, which is absolutely true," Lutfy said.
Major undertaking
The Royalmount Mall is not only the largest retail real estate project in Montreal in many years but it has also sparked concerns that large numbers of shoppers could increase traffic on the Decarie Expressway, the busy traffic hub it ajoins. The mall would become Canada’s second-largest behind the West Edmonton Mall if all the planned stages are ever built out.
Lutfy told two dozen reporters during a tour of the mall that he aims for two-thirds of shoppers to get to the site via public transit. Carbonleo invested roughly $50 million in a 200-metre footbridge connecting the mall over the Decarie Expressway to the De la Savane metro station to encourage the use of the public transit option.
“I’ve done my part,” said Lutfy. “I have invested $50 million to connect to the metro line. It’s not a small thing. It’s an important connection. It is nearly impossible to execute, to get approval for and yet we did it."
Lutfy told CoStar News that his company also owns land across the Decarie Expressway near the metro station where he hopes eventually to build housing.
The demographics in the densely-populated area are promising for the project, according to Lutfy who said that 87% of local millionaire households live within a 20-minute drive of the site and 1.2 million people live within a 15-minute drive, while the area has five times more university-educated residents than the local average.
He said that many nearby residents have a mother tongue other than English or French, and he identified that demographic as being more open to global and American brands.
The shopping centre has 4,000 outdoor parking spaces. Parking is free for 30 minutes or less, and motorists who download the mall's app get a second half-hour free. Each half-hour thereafter costs $2.50.
Carbonleo hopes to include a housing component at the mall but municipal authorities in the Town of Mount Royal have not approved that part of the plan. Lutfy told reporters Tuesday that he plans to persist in seeking approvals to add housing to the property.
The mall was completed with financial help from L. Catterton, an arm of French billionaire Bernard Arnault’s LVMH luxury consumer goods empire.