Toombul Shopping Centre closure to continue to spark retail gridlock during holiday season

The permanent closure of flood-prone Toombul Shopping Centre will cause parking mayhem in some of Brisbane’s best-known retail precincts for years to come.

The closure of the Toombul Shopping Centre will continue to cause parking pain around Brisbane for years to come, according to a retail expert.

QUT retail specialist Gary Mortimer said Mirvac’s permanent closure of flood-prone Toombul, which had 1700 carparking spaces, will cause massive gridlock during peak periods especially in the lead up to Christmas.

On Saturday hundreds of shoppers were forced to wait hours and others abandoned their cars after Westfield Chermside and Westfield North Lakes car parks became gridlocked as last-minute Father’s Day shopping turned into a nightmare.

“With 1700 car parks now gone people in that northern part of Brisbane area obviously still need to go to shopping centres to do their grocery shopping, visit department stores and I expect parking will only going to get worse as we move into that busy Christmas trading period,” Dr Mortimer said.

“The only other option is to move online and that might work for grocery shopping but most people want to go out, have lunch, go to a movie and browse the stores.

“Retail is still essentially a very social activity to there is no solution. Until they rebuild Toombul local shopping centres and even those further afield will continue to suffer parking gridlock.”

Some shoppers waited three hours to exit the Westfield Chermisde shopping centre car park, others gave up and abandoned their cars due to the gridlock.

One shopper told the ABC his family tried to leave Chermside shopping centre at 12.20pm Saturday, but “moved four spaces in two and a half hours”.

The man’s partner took their two young children for lunch during the wait, but when they returned to the car it had not moved at all.

After three hours waiting, the family gave up and returned their car to its park – returning by Uber later in the day when the queue had died down.

“Not the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon,” he said.

Burpengary woman Karla Parry, 40, visited Westfield North Lakes for 45 minutes on Saturday, but took almost twice that long to get out of the car park.

“It’s not the first time, honestly,” Mrs Parry said. “As soon as we got into the mess, I knew.”

In May ASX-listed Mirvac announced it was closing Toombul Shopping Centre permanently terminating the leases of up to 130 businesses after the February floods smashed the much-loved 54-year-old retail hub.

At this stage Mirvac has not revealed their plans for the Toombul Shopping Centre site at Nundah.

The empty Toombul Shopping Centre car park

Dr Mortimer said an added issue for shopping centres was that retail spending continued to perform strongly.

“We thought that as international borders opened up we would see a softening in retail spend but we have not,” he said.

“We’re still shopping and still spending despite the increase in the cost of living.”

Raine & Horne Commercial Brisbane North principal Trent Bruce said a number of smaller retail centres in the area have been trading “exceptionally well” since Toombul closed.

“I don’t think we realised what a great location – apart from the water – Toombul was being in between a lot of affluent suburbs,” he said.

“Now that’s it’s gone it’s made such a big difference. Bricks and mortar is very important and we have to remember a lot of retailers have not had a fun time in the last two years with Covid and they have a lot to catch up on.”