Talking shop: Tracking $10B in NYC retail property sales

Nearly $10 billion worth of standalone storefronts have changed hands over the past five and a half years in New York City.

But the neighborhoods trading the most volume in this category of commercial property are likely not the ones you’d expect — except, perhaps, for the No. 1 spot.

SoHo’s tony shopping district boasted the highest volume for retail building sales since the start of 2019, but most of the rest of the top 10 neighborhoods are in the outer boroughs. 

The Real Deal searched the city’s ACRIS property transaction database for all sales of retail buildings worth $1 million or more recorded from the start of 2019 through the second quarter of this year, identifying 1,623 deals totalling $9.8 billion. Commercial condos and properties that included retail but predominantly had different uses, such as offices and multifamily buildings with ground-floor retail, were not included.

Excluding commercial condos took much of Manhattan priciest retail space out of the picture, and as a result, Brooklyn’s total volume of retail building sales actually topped Manhattan’s, which itself wasn’t much higher than the volume in Queens. But the average cost of a retail building in Manhattan was more than double the average for Brooklyn and Queens. 

Brooklyn and Manhattan accounted for about 30 percent each of the city’s total volume of retail building sales since the start of 2019, and Queens booked about 25 percent, with the remaining 15 percent trading in Bronx and Staten Island.

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As for the neighborhoods where these deals went down, SoHo is uniquely positioned to top the charts for sales of retail buildings because it is both high-end and low-rise, so the area’s posh stores are typically buildings in their own right, rather than the commercial condos more common along the Fifth and Madison Avenue shopping corridors, which placed No. 6 in retail building sales, with less than a third of SoHo’s volume.

The downtown shopping mecca’s $609 million in volume was spread across 25 deals, but just two of them accounted for over 40 percent of that total. In 2021, Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo purchased its flagship store at 546 Broadway from AB & Sons — the firm led by Isaac, Eli and Abraham Chetrit — for $160 million. Another $93 million of SoHo’s total came from the 2019 purchase of an assemblage centered on 106 Prince Street and anchored by luxury retailer Louis Vuitton.

The neighborhood with the next-highest volume of retail building transactions was Brooklyn’s North Williamsburg, which saw over $436 million in volume since the start of 2019. But a third of that volume was accounted for by just one deal — and an unfortunate one at that: In early 2021, troubled developer RedSky Capital handed over 14 retail properties to its mezzanine lender, BlackRock, in a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure action valuing the portfolio at $145 million.

Flushing ranked No. 3 in the city for retail building sales, with $372 million across 39 transactions. The largest was the Modell family’s 2021 sale of its eponymous sporting goods store at 39-12 Main Street in downtown Flushing, followed by the $48 million sale in 2022 of a one-story former Korean restaurant to developer Hang Dong Zhang with plans to convert it into a 14-story, mixed-use condo building.

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