Brooklyn commercial sales top $5B in 2013: report

Commercial sales in Brooklyn boomed in 2013 and increased a whopping 393 percent over the last four years, according to commercial brokerage and advisory firm TerraCRG’s fourth-annual Brooklyn sales report.

A total of 1,955 commercial sales were completed in the borough of Kings in 2013, with $5 billion in sales — a 15 percent increase in dollar volume from 2012, according to the report. The largest year-over-year dollar-volume increase was in the industrial/office asset class, which doubled from $323.9 million in 2012 to $761.8 million in 2013, the data show. Overall, the Downtown Brooklyn/Park Slope “region” had the borough’s highest dollar volume, with sales up 67 percent to $1.5 billion from last year.

Multifamily buildings snagged the highest total dollar volume for the year, hitting $1.6 billion in trades and a total of 663 transactions, while a total of 596 mixed-use building transactions were completed in 2013, with a total consideration of $713 million — a 27 percent increase in transaction volume and 49 percent jump in dollar volume from 2012. The average transaction was for roughly $1.2 million, according to the report.

A total of 118 retail transactions totaling roughly 1.2 million square feet brought in a total of approximately $519 million — a 56 percent drop due to the $751 Million Kings Plaza trade in 2012, according to the report. Sales of residentially-zoned vacant land hit 221 transactions, totaling more than 5.3 million buildable square feet, and a total of $673 million, while sales of commercially-zoned industrial and office buildings totaled more than 3.9 million square feet. — Julie Strickland