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Business centre to hold socially distant open house

‘It is is really exciting, this building is a new shiny building now’
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The South Cariboo Business Centre. (Submitted photo)

To celebrate both the lifting of the COVID-19 shutdown and new renovations to the South Cariboo Business Centre there is a grand re-opening on Friday, July 3.

The principal owner of the South Cariboo Business Centre, Konrad Bernhard Maria Schmid-Meil, says after attempting to sell it, he chose to keep the property for himself and began to fix it up and build a familial relationship with his tenants.

“I really enjoyed how whenever I came into the building… my tenants they all greet each other like friends, like partners, there was never the big landlord thing there was just friends and partners,” Schmid-Meil said.

During COVID-19 Schmid-Meil was able to get government help to offer his commercial tenants rent subsidies to help lessen the impact of the shutdown on their businesses. This meant they only had to pay 25 per cent of their rent for the last three months while the government covered another 50 per cent of the rent.

He also continued to renovate the building as he has for the last decade putting in roughly a million dollars worth of renovations and upgrades over the years. These include repainting, installing a new high-quality heating system with several boilers, installing LED lighting, new flooring, painting the hallways and installing new siding on the outside of the building. During the COVID-19 shutdown,

They’re now done putting the new siding on the centre and redoing the flooring which looks great, he says.

“It is is really exciting, this building is a new shiny building now with all the most modern things we can have and I think my tenants love it too, from what they’ve told me,” Schmid-Meil said.

Part of the reason he’s organizing this grand re-opening is to show off how prosperous the business centre is and, by proxy, how prosperous 100 Mile is. By making the building itself shiny he’s hoping to encourage people to start seeing the positive side of things and come to see 100 Mile as being on the rise rather than the decline.

On Friday, July 3 at 11 a.m. Schmid-Meil has invited local dignitaries and the whole public to an open house to tour the building in small groups and see the renovations. Afterwards, he invites people to sit together but apart outside and chat and catch up.

“What I’d like to do is bring a positive message into this town,” Schmid-Meil said. “I think that 100 Mile is going more and more to a destination town, it’s still not too expensive to live and I think many people from the Coast can have a different view of 100 Mile.”

He believes that more and more people will see the great quality of life in 100 Mile, including the clean air, beautiful surroundings and welcoming people and want to relocate to the area. Schmid-Meil thinks it’s a beautiful place to live and one that has all the amenities a person could need and as long as people focus on its positive aspects, it should have a bright future ahead of it.


newsroom@100milefreepress.net

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Patrick Davies

About the Author: Patrick Davies

An avid lover of theatre, media, and the arts in all its forms, I've enjoyed building my professional reputation in 100 Mile House.
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