Tag: Avenue Commercial

Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting Notes

Today I attended the Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting and finally learned about the status of our troubled Concrete Equities investment. There’s some bad news, and some good news. Overall though, it was net-positive: the bottom line is that there’s some debt to deal with (the vultures want their pound of flesh), but we have full ownership of our property, are cash-flow positive, and things are looking up in terms of us eventually getting back on track for the cash disbursements we all signed up for. I took as many notes as I could; here they are in point form:

  • Presented by Steven Butt, General Partner, Avenue Commercial
  • Very positive on this particular building
  • They were given millions of pages of documents by Ernst & Young; hard drives. Five months of work to process, several hundreds of thousands of pages scanned
  • They’re not going to go back and look at all the documents – they’re moving forward
  • We now have financial statements (hooray!)
  • T-5013 tax forms are available
  • Castleridge: 8.25 acres of property, 74,000 square feet of leasable space
  • Building constructed in 19991 and in good condition, but the overall property needs some work. Suffers from a few years of neglect
  • Nov 2007 we paid 24.2 million for the Castleridge location. Concrete took $3.2 million as their fee.
  • The June 2008 appraisal was $18.5 million; the June 2010 appraisal $18.2 million
  • Loss in value of $5.7 million. Why? Large promotion fee, receivership costs, spike in retail vacancy, 30% vacancy
  • Exit of CCAA after 1.5 years in July 21st, 2010

Continue reading Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting Notes

Avenue Commercial Schedules Annual General Meeting

If you’re an investor in any of the five ill-fated Concrete Equities properties in Calgary, now being run by Avenue Commercial, there’s an important meeting coming up on April 29th. It’s being held at the Highland Park Community Association Hall (3716 – 2nd Street NW). The schedule is as follows:

  • MEG LP Investment Corp: 9:00am  to   9:45am
  • Millrise Deer Valley LP Investment Corp: 10:30am to  11:15am
  • Castleridge LP Investment Corp: 12:00pm to  12:45pm
  • Lavalin LP Investment Corp: 2:00pm  to  2:45pm
  • CE Place Investment Corp: 3:30pm  to  4:15pm

You’re required to bring photo ID with you for registration – which starts 30 minutes prior to each meeting, and closes 10 minutes after the meeting starts – and only registered owners will be permitted into the building. I’ve emailed them to ask if husband/wife combos are permitted; the investment is in my wife’s name, but I’m the one who handles the investments in our family – so far no response from them, but I’d be surprised if they said not to this. No audio or video recording devices are permitted.

The email I received with this information alludes to some good news, so I’m tentatively hopeful that the investment we have in Castleridge will get back on track and earning us money like it was always supposed to.

Avenue Commercial Communicates About Concrete Equities

Since I still get emails every week or two asking for information about what happened to the Concrete Equities investments, I thought I’d share this piece of communication that came out in October of 2010. In a nutshell, Avenue Commercial has taken over as property managers for the five Calgary properties (Millrise Deer Valley, Castleridge, MEG Place, CEP, Lavalin). If you have an investment in something other than those five properties, you should contact Ernst & Young’s Calgary office at 403-290-4100 to inquire about the status of your investment.

The PDF below has some of the background information, but as of mid-February, no specifics have been given out about where each property is at in terms of financials and revenue. I’m not aware of any payments having been sent out to any investors yet; when I inquired earlier this month about the status of things, I was told there would be an AGM in the first week of March. No date, no location as of yet.

“To Our Valued Investors; For those of you I have yet to meet, I would like to introduce myself.  I am Steven Butt, the President and Founder of Avenue Commercial and feel honored to be the person for whom nearly 100% of you voted in favor for as the new General Partner. Over the past 18 months, I have had the pleasure of meeting, speaking and hearing the concerns of many investors as we together have fought through many significant challenges to salvage your valued investments. Now, after many emotional town hall meetings, court sessions, receivers meetings and countless hours of work on the part of our in house team, our legal team and your steering committee, we have exited many of the court proceedings and the future of your investment at last appears much brighter. As most of you know, we suffered through extensive damage from a cash flow perspective as the court process initiated by Concrete Equities cost the Limited Partners in excess of 3 million dollars and we are coming out of restructuring with numerous smaller creditors and over 3 million dollars in debt  payable to the Strategic group.  These are not paltry obligations and it will take some time to retire our trailing debts but with hard work and a structured payment plan, we can and will shed these obligations over time.”

Avenue Commercial Investors Update Oct 2010

Avenue Commercial’s contact information: 403-802-6766 / www.avenuecommercial.com