Soho’s been hit hard by the national retail slump, sending the neighborhood’s availability rate soaring to 23.1 percent in the second quarter of this year.
Asking rents for ground-floor retail space in the neighborhood also plummeted 12 percent from the end of 2015 to $478 per square foot, the Wall Street Journal reported, based on data from Cushman & Wakefield. Commercial property sales have also dragged, only reaching $79 million in the second quarter compared to $1.7 billion at the end of 2015.
“People were making the assumption that Soho was experiencing a huge upswing in retail rents and prices, everything going up and up and up,” Cushman’s Keegan Mehlhorn told the Journal. “We are in an area of disconnect between buyers and sellers right now.”
Soho, along with other expensive retail hubs like Fifth and Madison avenues, have been hit harder than other parts of Manhattan, in part, due to the increase in rents after the recession. In the first quarter of 2017, half of Manhattan’s 12 most important retail markets had availability rates of 20 percent or more.
Earlier this week, The Real Deal took a deep dive into the retail vacancy epidemic on the Upper East Side and mapped all the empty storefronts. There were 82 of them.[WSJ] — Kathryn Brenzel