Shahin Alizadeh is excited about his latest business move. After developing a mixed-use development downtown for automotive, residential and commercial usage overlooking the foot of the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, the president and CEO of Downtown Auto Group has just opened a Nissan dealership. It is close to Yorkdale Shopping Mall and near the busy Highway 401. Alizadeh has called it Yorkdale Nissan.
He had a previous Nissan location four kilometres away, which he leased, called Avenue Nissan. He owns the property of the new location, which he said was important. The location had been used for selling cars for 50 years. Alizadeh had been there for 13 years.
There are some other dealerships retailing different brands that have either moved into the Yorkdale area or have plans to do so to take advantage of the huge customer traffic in the mall.
“That area (near Yorkdale) is such an upscale area now with Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, so that was one of the rationales for the move, plus the space was so limited (at Avenue Nissan),” Alizadeh told Canadian auto dealer.
“We talked about having a decent-sized used car lot and a little bit of exposure to Highway 401,” he said. “That was really the impetus behind it. We also give ourselves more of an opportunity to sell pre-owned. At the old dealership the most we had room for was 15-20 cars. Here we could have 70-80 if we wanted to. It’s a big difference because of the size of the property. Having said all that, when you move it’s like a startup.”
“We renamed it Yorkdale Nissan just to be a little bit more relevant to the proximity of Yorkdale. I’m sure there are clients that are feeling a little disappointed to have their neighbourhood dealership disappear, but on balance I needed to make the store more visible to more people and a larger demographic. That’s basically the background of the decision. It’s a great location and it draws from midtown and the north part of the city.”
Alizadeh said the service department across the road from the dealership could have 20 bays, compared to 12 at the previous one. All combined, the facility for new cars and the one across the street for used vehicles and service totals more than 55,000 square feet (5,109 square metres). It’s basically double the size of the old site.
He is pumped about the move but said it doesn’t come anything close to the automotive/residential/commercial hub at the south end of Toronto retailing numerous brands.
“We now have everything from luxury with Lexus, Infiniti, Genesis, Lincoln to mainstream cars such as Hyundai, Toyota, Ford, Nissan,” said Alizadeh. “I think we’ve now created a very strong destination. It is more exciting to me because it has a destination component.”
He said the Yorkdale Nissan store will have a grand opening at some point.
