Retail property sales triple since start of 2013

Adelaide Polsinelli
Adelaide Polsinelli

Retail property sales hit $445 million in the third quarter, up three times from the first quarter of this year, according to a December market report from commercial brokerage Eastern Consolidated.

Growing confidence among national, international and local buyers buoyed the numbers, Adelaide Polsinelli, senior director at Eastern Consolidated, said. She also pointed to the recent repeal of the so-called 80-20 rule, which capped residential co-ops buildings’ gross income from ground-floor retail at 20 percent, as giving the market supply a boost.

“It’s opening up the value of those leases to other tenants, where before they were sleepy and no one paid attention,” Polsinelli told Crain’s, which first reported the figures.

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Buyers of retail properties and tenants searching for space include high-end French designers, with an eye on side streets such as Broome and Mercer in Soho, and Hudson and Horatio in the Meatpacking District, she told Crain’s. New retail developments like the World Trade Center’s block of shops, Fulton Transit Center’s retail concourse and The Broadway Marketplace at the George Washington Bridge Bus Station were also cited in the report.

Eastern Consolidated launched a retail leasing arm last month, a little more than a year after kicking off a retail investment sales group headed by Polsinelli. [Crain’s]Julie Strickland