The Hive has announced three new tenants for the first phase of the business park its building in downtown Kamloops.

BDC Canada will be relocating its Kamloops branch to the fourth floor of the new building. Smile Dentistry will be moving in on the ground floor, which will be its second office in Kamloops. And William Wright Commercial Real Estate Services will be expanding to Kamloops, moving in on the fourth floor.

“The opportunity to expand our business into Kamloops has been something we’ve considered for a few years and the timing worked perfectly to purchase in The Hive,” Cory Wright says, the president of William Wright Commercial.

With these additions, phase one now has 60 per cent of its floor space committed to businesses, and Invictus Properties and AT&T Developments say it should be 100 per cent committed by August. Before today, Urban Systems had committed to being the anchor tenant in the new building, and McMillan Dubo Law Group has also committed to occupy it as well.

The first phase of the project will now be a six-storey building with 60,000 square feet of commercial space, at the corner of 5th Avenue and Lansdowne Street. Initial expectations were that it was going to be five.

The project proponents say both levels of underground parking are now finished, and say the project has hit a construction milestone with the steel frame now going up. The building is expected to be open in a year from now, in February of 2022.

The Hive is expected to take up the entire block on Lansdowne Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, with three-to-four buildings included in the long-term build out over three phases.

Invictus Properties vice president Bryan Pilbeam says the capital investment in the project is more than $30 million.

Phase one of The Hive will be the first new commercial-only building built in downtown Kamloops since 2007.