Same Storefronts, New Owner: What's Actually Changing at South Hill Mall

Saturday morning in South Hill still runs on the same loop it always has. Groceries at the Safeway inside South Hill Mall, a prescription picked up at Shoppers on the way out, maybe a movie at the Galaxy Cinemas later if the kids behave through dinner. Nothing about the storefronts looks different. The Winners sign is the same red. Wendy's still has the drive-through line that wraps toward 2nd Avenue West on a Friday night.

But the mall itself changed hands, and most of the people running that Saturday loop never noticed.

A name most of South Hill has never heard

On December 10, 2024, a Montreal-based investment firm called Leyad announced it had purchased South Hill Mall. The press release quoted CEO Henry Zavriyev calling it a strategic investment that would strengthen the company's retail presence in Prince Albert and let it leverage synergies across its properties here, driving efficiencies in management and operations. That is corporate language for something simpler: a company most South Hill residents have never heard of now decides what happens to the mall they shop at every week.

It wasn't Leyad's first stop in Prince Albert. Six months earlier, in June 2024, the same firm bought the Cornerstone Shopping Centre for 94 million dollars, a deal so large it ranked among the biggest commercial real estate transactions in Saskatchewan in five years. Leyad already owned Stockyards in the city too. South Hill Mall was the third piece of a Prince Albert portfolio the company was quietly assembling, not a one-off purchase of a struggling property.

The buying didn't stop at the city limits

What's easy to miss from inside South Hill is that Prince Albert wasn't the finish line. It was practice.

Through 2025, Leyad picked up St. Albert Centre outside Edmonton and Londonderry Mall inside the city. In February 2026, it closed on St. Vital Centre in Winnipeg for 160.5 million dollars, a shopping centre that runs close to a million square feet and ranks among the most prominent malls in Manitoba. A month later, in March 2026, the company added Lloyd Mall in Lloydminster to the list. Along the way it also picked up the Pen Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario, a property that exceeds a million square feet with long-term redevelopment potential attached.

Lined up like this, South Hill Mall stops looking like an isolated purchase and starts looking like the first entry in a pattern. Every property on that list shares one trait: a grocery or pharmacy anchor generating steady, boring, dependable foot traffic. Zavriyev said as much when the Lloyd Mall deal closed.

"Grocery and pharmacy anchored centres now represent our highest-grossing tenant category, and this acquisition further strengthens that segment of our portfolio."

South Hill Mall fits that description exactly. Safeway and Shoppers Drug Mart are doing the heavy lifting on foot traffic, the same role they play at every other property on Leyad's list.

What the playbook looked like the last time it ran

Lloyd Mall is the clearest preview available, because Leyad didn't just buy it in 2026. The company's earlier work there shows what happens once a grocery-anchored mall gets the full treatment.

Back in 2021, Lloyd Mall went through what Leyad itself describes as a structural transformation rather than a cosmetic upgrade. Safeway and Shoppers Drug Mart were relocated into larger, more modern formats designed to anchor the centre and pull in regular visits. Lifestyle brands came in around them, Bath & Body Works and Urban Planet among them, aimed at diversifying the tenant mix and drawing a younger shopper. One vacancy has lingered since then, a roughly 7,000-square-foot box left empty when Sears Canada liquidated in 2017, and Leyad says leasing efforts to fill it are ongoing.

Nothing has been announced for South Hill Mall along those lines, and nothing in the public record suggests a renovation is scheduled. But the Lloyd Mall example is the only concrete evidence available for how this particular buyer behaves once it owns a property for a few years, and it's worth knowing if you're the one doing the Saturday grocery run.

The mall you know is already a product of an earlier reshuffle

Here's the part that gets lost in a story about a new owner: South Hill Mall has been through this before, just under different management.

The mall opened in 1972 as South Hill Place, anchored by Hudson's Bay, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Woolco. For a decade it was the only enclosed mall in Prince Albert, until Gateway Mall opened downtown in 1982 at nearly double the size. The Bay eventually closed and Safeway moved into that space. Woolco became Walmart in 1994, and Walmart stayed until it relocated to 800 15th Street East by September 2001. The space Walmart left behind is what became today's Shoppers Drug Mart, Galaxy Cinemas, and Winners.

In other words, the current tenant lineup, Safeway, Winners, Shoppers Drug Mart, GoodLife Fitness, Galaxy Cinemas, Dollarama, Lake Country Co-op Liquor, Montana's BBQ & Bar, and Wendy's, is itself the result of a reshuffle that happened decades ago under a different landlord entirely. South Hill Mall doesn't sit still. It just moves slowly enough that residents forget the last time it moved at all.

The rest of South Hill's errand list hasn't budged

Not everything on the South Hill side of the city runs through a corporate acquisitions calendar. The South Hill Medical Practice at 2685 2nd Avenue West still runs its walk-in clinic seven days a week, no appointment needed, open until 8 PM on weekdays and welcoming patients on weekends too, with an on-site pharmacy for the same trip. It's the kind of neighborhood fixture that doesn't show up in a press release but shows up in how the neighborhood actually functions day to day.

South Hill Cemetery, at Marquis Road and 1st Avenue West, is the other anchor that predates any of this. It's a city-operated cemetery with sections set aside for Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Greek Orthodox, Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Hebrew, Protestant, and non-denominational traditions, along with a designated Field of Honour for veterans. It's a reminder that South Hill was a real, settled community long before a mall or a mall's owner had anything to say about it.

What to actually watch for

If you live in South Hill, nothing about this requires you to do anything different this week. The Safeway is still the Safeway. The movie theater still runs the same showtimes it always has. But if a year from now you notice the grocery store has moved to a bigger footprint inside the building, or a national specialty retailer signs a lease where a smaller shop used to be, you'll know it's not random. It's the same move Leyad already made four hours west, on a mall that looked a lot like this one before it did.

I keep an eye on this kind of thing because it's part of understanding a neighborhood well enough to help someone buy or sell in it with confidence, not just recite a listing description. If you're curious about what else has shifted in South Hill lately, or you're thinking about your own next move here, Brooke Wozniak is happy to walk through it with you. Book a consultation whenever you're ready.