Soho retail-leasing boom bolstering investment sales
Soho's retail-leasing boom has spilled over to the investment-sale market. As ground-floor rents rose to an average $1,000 per square foot — and up to $1,800 as Ferrari is said to be paying to launch its 'lifestyle boutique' at 92 Prince Street – sale values for retail properties in the landmarked, cast-iron district have also skyrocketed.
Blackstone recently paid $197 million for the four locations totaled 131,000 square feet – Manhattan's largest retail play purchase since 2021.
4 Rendering of 115 Spring Street.
SL Green Realty
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Now, SL Green hopes to cash in on the frenzy by offering for sale its retail condominium at 115 Spring St. – a building that's home to condo apartments upstairs, but with 5,100 square feet of precious, two-level storefront space. SLG, the city's largest commercial landlord, has owned it since 2014, when it bought the property in tandem with 121 Greene St. for a combined $110 million.
Dan Kaplan, an executive vice president in CBRE's investment properties group who is marketing the offering, declined to say how much it might fetch. Some similar-size recent neighborhood retail sites have traded for upwards of $70 million, sources said.
'There's very little availability,' Kaplan said. 'Everybody wants to be in Soho – high-end brands, middle-ground brands, tech brands.'
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Kaplan said current tenant Adidas's lease is up at the end of next March, when the vacancy will make the two-level storefront condo even more valuable thanks to ever-rising rents. He said the property could appeal either to a retailer that would use the space for a store of its own, or to an investor.
4 Soho's shopping district on Black Friday last year.
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Vacancies are scarce and demand for space is insatiable. Los Angeles Apparel chose 480 Broadway for its first Big Apple location. Prada at 575 Broadway covets the space that's home to popular Lure Fishbar on the building's Mercer Street side.
Soho's remarkable, post-pandemic resurgence as one of the world's premier shopping districts reflects the city's extraordinary regenerative powers. The concentration of stores and galleries in the cast-iron district bounded by Houston and Canal streets and Sixth Avenue and Crosby Street rivals that in any part of Midtown.
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4 Most streets – especially Broadway, West Broadway, and Prince and Spring streets – boast luxury lines.
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4 People walk through a shopping district in the SoHo neighborhood in Manhattan on April 11, 2022 in New York City.
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Most streets – especially Broadway, West Broadway, and Prince and Spring streets – boast luxury lines such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Brunello Cucinelli as well as mass-market names like TJ Maxx and Victoria's Secret. There might be more art and antiques galleries today than ever — although they're public-oriented retail galleries, not showplaces for esoteric art as they were in the 1970s and '80s.
Sidewalks are near-impassable with shoppers and sightseers. At the gateway corner of West Broadway and Houston, Corner Store restaurant draws scenemakers at all hours. Thriving brasserie Balthazar at 80 Spring Street has witnessed the neighborhood's evolution since 1997 – including the COVID years, when the New York Times in October 2021 reported Soho was the city's commercial district hardest hit by the pandemic's financial devastation which caused more than 40 stores to close.
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