The Masters home-improvement retail giant has pulled the plug on its plan for a $25 million store off Scott Rd, Tamworth, but city leaders remain confident the hardware business will eventually move into town when its financial position improves.
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And while city leaders weren’t prepared to suggest that the proposed Masters site – near a billabong and floodprone land off Scott Rd – was a bad choice averted, they did admit to lobbying Masters executives to look at other prime positions for a future store.
The council yesterday announced what plenty of market analysts and business people had been privately saying and expecting for months: that the Masters plan for a big move into Tamworth was dead in the water, because of poor financial results elsewhere in its Australian stores.
The home renovation super-store rollout has come to a stop when it comes to some regional openings – Tamworth and Dubbo among the victims announced as going onto the backburner.
Mayor Col Murray said yesterday he and council general manager Paul Bennett had met in the morning with a Masters senior development manager, Tony Pratt, who gave them the latest news.
“Mr Pratt informed us the project in Tamworth has been deferred indefinitely and Masters has allowed the options to purchase the sites in Hinton St and Scott Rd to lapse,” Cr Murray said.
“Mr Pratt explained the decision was not a reflection on Tamworth but rather a new company focus put in place by the new CEO, who wants the company to consolidate and improve the performance of their existing stores and increase its presence in metropolitan areas before expanding further in regional Australia.
“Other regional centres, including Dubbo, have also been told that their proposed Masters developments will not proceed.”
The Tamworth plans started going cold earlier last year, when financial results for the big opposition player to the Bunnings empire were less than satisfactory.
Financial reports indicated Woolies, which owns Masters, had reshaped the pace of its opening rollouts from between 80 and 90 by 2016 to about 70 or 80 stores, and that the bigger focus would be on metro centres, not regional areas.
Mr Pratt was among the Masters executives who first came to Tamworth in April 2013 to announce they planned a 13,500 square metre store off Locks Ln, Scott Rd and Hilton St that would provide 150 jobs in retail when complete. It was to open in early 2015, one of half a dozen in the first regional rollout.
Barbara and Jack York – the longtime owners of the property and family home right across the road from the Masters site and among the most vocal critics of the plan there – were celebrating a David-and-Goliath-battle win last night.
Despite their joy at the news, they were also disappointed.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Mrs York said yesterday.
“We’re disappointed that they are pulling out of Tamworth, but in two years I haven’t had one person say to me that this was a good place to put it.”
Their daughter, businesswoman Leonie Fitzpatrick, was also a vocal critic – and an energetic researcher and planning analyst who led the lobby group against the proposal.
Ms Fitzpatrick was among the 200 submission writers to the original rezoning application by Masters for a couple of sites to clear the way for a proposed development application.
Like others, she had what she claimed was overwhelming evidence about the problems that would emerge, such as traffic issues, flooding and residential amenity.
Ms Fitzpatrick admitted the news was astounding.
“I’m dancing on the inside,” she said.
“We were waiting and we were worried because there had been some talk about the options on the land having been renewed, but this is a total shock.
“We look to have a Masters CEO now who has some commercial nous in relation to the financial decision, but yes – it is really disappointing for Tamworth and we would welcome them here, but our opposition was always about the location. This was a crazy location.”
Deputy mayor Russell Webb yesterday said he was confident Masters would eventually put Tamworth on its retail radar again.
He said that while he believed the Scott Rd site was not a preferred location by many, he thought it was the wrong spot, too, and would like to try to encourage them to another prime bulkygoods site.