Retail asking rents rise in Greenpoint and DoBro, dip in W’Burg: report

Retail asking rents in Greenpoint and Downtown Brooklyn are on the rise thanks to an influx of new residential developments. And Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, which saw a similar pattern years ago, is watching asking asks fall as tenants become increasingly wary of higher prices and the impending L Train shutdown.

The biggest rent growths in the borough were seen on Greenpoint’s Franklin Street, where ground-floor asking rents jumped 42 percent year-over-year to $89 per square foot, and Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Street, which saw asking rents climb 8 percent to $325 per square foot, according to a new report by GFI Realty Services cited by the Wall Street Journal.

Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, on the other hand, saw asking rents drop 18 percent to $295 per square foot, according to the study.

Retailers are waiting to see where asking rents will go after they shot up rapidly, and the planned partial shutdown of the L Train in 2019 has added to the decline, said GFI president Michael Weiser. Brooklyn, he added, has been “under-retailed from a national perspective” for years, but is catching up.

Residential condominiums are averaging roughly $1,400 per square foot. In Greenpoint, where condos average more than $1,200 per square foot, more than 10,000 new apartments are expected to come online before the end of 2019. And in Downtown Brooklyn, roughly 5,000 apartments are expected to be developed by 2022. [WSJ] – Rich Bockmann