Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson is pressing city manager Penny Ballem for answers as to why in-camera information about real estate deals take so long to be released to the public once deals are finalized.
Concern arose this week after the city took more than three months to respond to Cedar Party mayoral candidate Glen Chernen's freedom of information request to view the lease that the city agreed to with fast-growing technology company HootSuite in November 2012.
Questions continue to swirl around whether the city gave HootSuite too sweet a deal on city-owned real estate in order to prevent HootSuite from leaving town.
"I'd like to hear the straight story from the city manager," Robertson told a media scrum January 23. "It's important that information that is in camera gets out as soon as possible. [The HootSuite lease] was a real estate transaction and the city has to deal with those confidentially until they are completed. I don't know what the delay was and I want to know why. I've worked really hard since the Olympic debacle when the city was not releasing information."
Avison Young statistics show that Class C office space in the Vancouver Broadway neighbourhood leases for between $27 and $33 per square foot. The 33,000-square-foot building at 5 East 8th Avenue, which HootSuite occupies, is considered Class C office space.
The city gave HootSuite a lease at $17 per square foot in the first year with the rate rising to $22 per square foot in the company's fifth year of occupancy, according to the lease agreement obtained by Business in Vancouver.
The complex 71-page agreement also sets out that HootSuite can exercise an option to buy its premises for $9.3 million until December 31, 2015.
That price is about $300,000 below the property's 2012 assessed value.
"There's no document that says 'This is a sweet deal,'" Chernen told BIV.
"It doesn't have to be a huge spread between what they're paying and what the market rate is. If you're talking $10 to $15 difference per square foot per month then the discounts start adding up rapidly."
Chernen said that he would "probably not" have given those inducements had he been in the mayor's chair.
On January 22, HootSuite acquired American social media analytics company uberVu. It has made at least two more acquisitions in the past couple years.
HootSuite secured $165 million in financing in August from Insight Venture Partners and its partners, Accel Partners and OMERS Ventures.
