KITCHENER –
The Hacienda Sarria property, home to a popular Kitchener wedding venue that closed last fall, is listed for sale for nearly $8 million.
The venue announced it was closing permanently in October 2020.
Bankruptcy documents showed Hacienda Sarria owed couples and creditors more than $1 million.
The listing describes the 5.66-acre site as “an incredible and unique property” that is “known as one of Ontario’s best wedding venues.”
It’s priced at $7,995,000.
A representative from BDO, the company handling the bankruptcy, said they can’t comment on the sale because the corporation selling the property isn’t the corporation that filed for bankruptcy.
They said the bankruptcy is ongoing and BDO is investigating transactions raised by creditors in conjunction with the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.
“Hacienda Sarria is bankrupt. It no longer exists. The building is for sale by the company that owns it. That is all that there is to say,” Nadine Doyle, president of the Hacienda Sarria, said in a statement.
Mitch Taylor, who lost his $6,000 deposit to the venue, said the process has been emotionally draining for him and the other creditors.
“For the group as a whole, there is some emotion behind it, because that was going to be all of our wedding venues and now it’s being sold,” he said. “Now there’s different emotion about it, because there’s over $1 million in lost funds and deposits that are still missing and not being repaid.”
Taylor and his wife got married elsewhere in July but are still waiting for their deposit money back from Hacienda.
“There was a clause saying that the 25 per cent deposit we put down would be paid back in the event that the event could not go through,” Taylor said.
He said he and dozens of other couples plan to take legal action against Hacienda.
“We obviously want to hold that party accountable,” said Taylor. “And we want to get with rightfully ours which is the deposit refund.”
“They just go under and they don’t communicate with anybody and they just take everybody’s money,” said Margarita Iarovaia, who was supposed to get married at Hacienda on Aug. 28, 2021. “$8,500 is a lot of money. There were couples that were affected that paid like three or four times as much as I did.”