Victoria Hotel publican to move on from Dimboola pub

It comes after a stall in lease negotiations between Mr Pilmore and the hotel's Melbourne-based landlord.

Mr Pilmore gave the landlord until August 13, 2021, to find alternative arrangements to run the hotel.

Negotiations around the lease and the business's sale started in early-2020 when Mr Pilmore's lease options for the 97-year-old pub expired.

Mr Pilmore said both parties could not agree on terms for a new lease of the hotel, with Mr Pilmore requesting the landlord to cover some outgoing expenses before the sale.

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"I put a proposal to the landlord saying, 'look we want to sell, we need to pay some of those outgoings', and I must still have options after that," Mr Pilmore said.

"He since wrote me back a letter through his solicitor that said it was totally unreasonable that I would ask, how dare I ask that he contribute to the outgoings.

"In terms of negotiating a new lease, and what is to be in a new lease, basically two parties can't agree. So, at this stage we have given notice that we are not wanting to continue."

Mr Pilmore said the landlord came back to him with an offer of a three-year lease, with no outgoings paid for and no lease options after the three years.

In commercial and retail lease agreements, tenants usually pay all of the businesses outgoings and insurance.

However, Mr Pilmore said insurance companies are flighty around ensuring country pubs, leading to increased premiums as well as an inability to sell unless landlords cover outgoing costs.

"When we talked to different agents about that and the set up of the current lease, what was being relayed back to me became apparent and very clear," Mr Pilmore said.

"There was a particular issue around insurance on country pubs. People that are buying the leases are pretty much steering clear of them unless the landlord is paying a significant amount, if not all, of that outgoing contribution.

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"I know of some people who have wanted to buy a hotel in Victoria, and the sale of that had fallen through because they couldn't get insurance. There's a reliance on the tenant to pay that insurance.

"And the insurance premiums just keep going up and up."

Mr Pilmore does not believe the landlord will compromise on the lease agreement but has reassured the community that Dimboola will not be without a pub.

"It's no advantage to the landlord to have an empty building with no business in it, and it's no advantage to me to leave this place as a going concern," Mr Pilmore said.

Mr Pilmore bought the business at the Victoria Hotel on May 11, 2015.

Before being a hotelier, he worked at a civil construction company in Horsham and at Wimmera Uniting Care for 11 years.

The story goes that Mr Pilmore was hosting friends from Horsham and had booked dinner at the Victoria Hotel for 7pm.

The group arrived 10 minutes late to find the hotel staff had shut the kitchen for the night. Mr Pilmore and his friends rushed home to get some food, as his wife was heavily pregnant at the time.

"We arrived and they said bad luck. We went home in a mad rush to find that we had no food," Mr Pilmore said.

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"The supermarket here closes on a weekend at midday, one o'clock. Me and my wife are freaking out, trying to feed her."

At around 7.30pm that same evening, Mr Pilmore and his friend went back to the hotel to buy more wine, only to find the hotel had closed for the night.

Mr Pilmore said the next day he went to the hotel to voice his complaints.

"The next day I came through extraordinarily upset and vented my frustration to the young girl who was working that night at the bottle-o, just to say it was very disappointing," Mr Pilmore said.

"That is if the owner doesn't want to run the business, he should consider selling it. She said that it was actually up for sale, so I said that I would buy it.

"Then I had to go home and face the music and tell my wife that we are going to buy the pub.

"The essence was that our community needed to be doing better than that."

Mr Pilmore described his tenure at the Victoria Hotel as an 'amazing journey'.

"The greatest thing I have enjoyed about owning a hotel has been people's stories," Mr Pilmore said.

"I get great joy from sitting down here, having some guests down here and having a glass of wine, just chatting.

"I have met some amazing people over the journey, that is for sure, and learnt a lot from those people as well. I think that is what I like about it. If you like and enjoy people's stories, hospitality can be bearable."

Mr Pilmore said he is grateful to be in the Wimmera community, which helped him personally during the restrictions of the COVID-19 lockdown.

"Mates of mine are farmers and they were good to talk to when we initially had to shut down. We were worried about what it meant and how it was going to pan out," Mr Pilmore said.

"It was tongue in cheek stuff, but it was kind of comforting for them to tell me, 'you can do it, we have done it, and it can be done'.

"Even though they might not think they were parting with good knowledge and comfort, they were. A lot of my farming friends were great.

"That is when I understood that the farming sector would help small businesses in a lot of ways aside from the obvious. I was very lucky to be in a resilient mindset."

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