A Look at Carroll Gardens Retail Rents
Massey Knakal, whose bread-and-butter business is the sale commercial properties, has done a very neat back-of-the-envelope report on retail rents in various neighborhoods around Brooklyn. The Carroll Gardens market is particularly interesting given what a shopping boomtown it’s become. According to the report, the priciest patch of storefronts, not surprisingly, is Smith Street between Union…
Massey Knakal, whose bread-and-butter business is the sale commercial properties, has done a very neat back-of-the-envelope report on retail rents in various neighborhoods around Brooklyn. The Carroll Gardens market is particularly interesting given what a shopping boomtown it’s become. According to the report, the priciest patch of storefronts, not surprisingly, is Smith Street between Union and Douglass. Massey Knakal‘s Senior Director of Sales for the area Ken Freeman estimates that market rates for that stretch are between $85 and $99 per foot. Next most expensive? It’s a tie between the Union-2nd Place stretch of Smith and pretty much all of Court Street in Carroll Gardens, where rents are in the $50s and $60s. The cheapest rents (less than $50 per foot) can be found south of 2nd Place on Smith Street.
12:00 here. Not bitter or an older broker from a mom and pop. Thank you very much. But I think that the shell game that Massey Knakal is playing is going to catch up to them. Since they don’t benefit that much from higher rents directly since they do little leasing in these areas (or for much of Brooklyn for that matter.) They are probably pushing these numbers to hype the potential sales prices of buildings they hope to get on the market in these areas. And when you lie you usually get caught. Now in Manhattan lying didn’t matter is my guess since the commercial market both for sales and leasing raced forward. But hello, things are different in Brooklyn. Yes, in the very distant future Brooklyn could get swallowed up and turned in to a giant mall like object that looks exactly like Manhattan. But for now most of these stores are owner occupied or in terms of Gowanus have industrial zoning and very little retail on those streets. So what they heck is this agency doing? Lying. My guess is that Ken Freeman is on here defending his agency’s sleazy tactics. And no, I don’t care about dry cleaners either. Just would hate to see massive building turnover and then emptying of retail businesses in order for them to sit vacant and/or the building owner to go belly up since he’s not getting the rents his agency told him he would get.
Propertyshark had a map overlay with retail price per square foot.
Would be more interesting if went all the way up to Atlantic Avenue and Atlantic itself.
Interesting part is what in this map is showing as priciest was the slowest stretch of Smith in days not so long ago.
Union to Butler was less retail – some social clubs, empty space, some offices and was quieter than north of here and not as attractive as the south of Union section.
(BTW – you read silly media stories about Smith b4 the transformation and they make it sound very different than what was reality).
Here’s my prediction. 12:00 is a older broker from a Mom and Pop shop bitter that their rent is going up and Massey is taking a lot of their business.
Uh, Smith Street south of 2nd PL? There’s maybe 4 possible storefront possibilities between 2nd and 9th.
And Lower Court St, south of 4th? Hard to believe there’s a demand for it, there are MANY empty storefronts, and many struggling businesses. Can’t imaging those rents going anywhere but down.
good point, 2:06.
and for god’s sake…every other business is open on sundays…why not a dry cleaner?
that’s the day i most think about stuff like that.
they are losing business from me.
i’d rather give the dry clean in a box a try in the basement dryer than try to coordinate my schedule around the few hours a week most dry cleaners seem to be open.
There’s a laundrymat/dry cleaner on Smith only a block or two from Sackett and I happen to know the owner owns the entire building and I believe the one next to it. There are also countless other small businesses on both Court St. and Smith St. where the operator is also the building’s owner. That’s one thing preventing Carroll Gardens from changing too rapidly.
The problem is when those owners decide to sell, realizing they can make more money renting to someone else than to run their own business. That’s why Dunkin Donuts came in and replaced Leonardo’s.
I also agree that those rent numbers are probably skewed. That Blockbuster storefront has been empty for a while now. With the market downturn, hopefully the change from small businesses to chains will slow down.
Please explain to me how a dry cleaner on the corner of (smith and Sackett) can’t afford a very substantial rent increase in 2008?
12yrs ago this spot was on a decidedly non white-collar street in a decidedly non-white collar area (east of court). Within this time the number of white-collar professionals (who use dry cleaning exponentially more), the number of new developments/units and level of income have all increased exponentially .
Look you can call the LL anything you want but it seems clear to me that no matter how you look at it the dry cleaner is either lazy or a very bad business person.
Some people find dry cleaners about as useless to a neighborhood as the aforementioned boutiques – to each his own. Everyone has their favorite shops and others have shops in their ‘hood that they never frequent. It is too easy to generalize.
As for the study, it too is very generalized and inaccurate. There are a lot of vacant shopfronts on the southern end of Court and Smith Streets that would be lower cost per SF than what is seen in the map.