Luxury retailer Hermès is close to signing a lease for a 4,800-square-foot Soho store.
The French luxury accessories company is close to inking a deal at Thor Equities and Premier Equities’ 63 Greene Street, Women’s Wear Daily reported.
Hermès will reportedly lease the space initially for one year, as tenants still wary of high retail rents have shown a preference for doing shorter-term deals. Gucci, for example, signed a two-year lease last year for 10,700 square feet in Soho at 375 West Broadway.
And while retail rents across the city have corrected from historic highs, areas like Soho are still awash in vacant storefronts.
A survey conducted by The Real Deal in October found 569,000 square feet of vacant retail space, or more than 16 percent of the neighborhood’s total retail.
Uzi Ben Abraham and Yaron Jacobi’s Premier Equities teamed up with Thor to buy the retail condo at 57-63 Greene Street in 2012 for $17.25 million, property records show.
Elsewhere, the partners are selling the Meatpacking District retail condo leased to Lexus to a subsidiary of Germany’s DZ Bank for $88 million.
Hermès last year signed a lease for a 10,000-square-foot store in the Meatpacking District. [WWD] – Rich Bockmann