Attraction and Pets Place also depart from the Cité shopping center in Assen

A year ago, the Jumbo announced that it would leave the shopping center. Six months later, the neighboring Lidl supermarket also left the building. That store wanted to remain located in the vicinity of a supermarket in a more expensive segment.

“It’s a great pity, but there’s no point doing it anymore. We have nothing to do here anymore,” says the assistant branch manager of the Attraction. The drugstore’s lease ran until the summer, but will not be renewed. As a result, there will soon be no more shops in the basement of the Cité shopping complex.

The drugstore will close its doors in a week and a half. The retail chain will not return to Assen. There is good news for the staff. They can all work at another branch or in one of the other stores of the umbrella organization AS Watson Group.

Pet shop Pets Place will also close its doors soon. Customers can visit the building on Kroonwerk for the last time on 15 July. Two days later, the store opens a new branch in another shopping center in the center of Assen. “Especially in the early days, this was a nice place to work,” says an employee. “But the location was never really a success. There are few people here. So I’m happy with a new start.”

The Mediamarkt has no relocation plans. The electronics giant signed for five years last year. Kitchen and bathroom store Voortman is also not planning to leave.

With the departure of the Attraction, a building of approximately 250 square meters remains. This means that a total of approximately 4,550 square meters of space will soon be available in the basement of the shopping centre. The space where the Jumbo used to live is still empty after almost a year. “Parties have been looking, but that has not yet led to anything,” says real estate agent Nol Goulmy of Oppject, the real estate company that rents out the properties in the Citadel shopping area.

Vacancy costs the owner of Citadel, SVE Group, a lot of money, according to the broker. The real estate agent therefore hopes that a tenant will arrive soon. That can be a supermarket again, but other options are also still open. “Such as a food market, or areas for sports and games, such as a go-kart track, trampoline park or fitness room,” says Goulmy. “But it could also be used for business services, for example.”

The Citadel shopping complex was built in 2010. Three years later, 93 apartments, 63 town houses, a shopping center of 12,000 square meters and a parking garage for 700 cars were built there. Since then, the Jumbo and Mediamarkt have been housed in the complex. At the time, the province pumped a million euros into the project and the government also contributed.

But ten years after the arrival of the residential and shopping complex, the municipality of Assen has completely different plans for the area. Assen would rather transform it into a place for kitchen or furniture companies or educational institutions. The municipality wants a more compact city center and less space for shops because the current shopping area is too extensive.

This is stated in the so-called inner city vision, a plan for the future as a prelude to a metamorphosis of the city. The Cité shopping center falls outside the city centre, just like the Triade shopping center a little further on. In addition, Assen has too many square meters for supermarkets, according to the municipality’s retail plan.

According to Goulmy, the vision of the municipality does not make the search for a new tenant more difficult. “It actually offers more opportunities, because we are now looking more broadly. Also at a different interpretation than shops. If we find such an interpretation, we know that the municipality is positive about it.”

The broker says that there is now interest in renting properties on the ground floor. “We are in talks with two serious parties,” said the broker. Voortman Kitchens and a launderette, among others, are already located there.