Streetlevel: Knotting Slope Closes
After almost five years in their shop at 242 7th Avenue in Park Slope, the folks behind hand-made carpet specialty store Knotting Slope are calling it quits. According to OTBKB, they couldn’t afford the rent increase the owner wanted to charge. Their loss is your gain: there’s currently a big going-out-of-business sale underway. GMAP
After almost five years in their shop at 242 7th Avenue in Park Slope, the folks behind hand-made carpet specialty store Knotting Slope are calling it quits. According to OTBKB, they couldn’t afford the rent increase the owner wanted to charge. Their loss is your gain: there’s currently a big going-out-of-business sale underway. GMAP
Joe:
A storefront similar to this on 7th Avenue rents from anywhere between 6-8K a month on average. Sometimes more.
Are you really trying to tell me that this is about trying to “recoup” costs?
You know the former Hollywood Video space down on 5th Avenue and 8th Street that’s been sitting there vacant for a year? Rent is 29K a month.
Thanks Bessie for a reality check from someone who knows what they are talking about.
I will add that with expenses going up and little way to recoup those costs from residential tenants with stabilized leases, landlords often rely heavily on their commercial tenants to make ends meet.
Sorry but I’ll have to agree with What on this one. The tenant probably signed a multi-year lease and now doesn’t want to pay the increase they agreed to.
I own this same kind of store and I’ve never found any kind of tax advantage to letting it sit idle. It does, however, take a bit of time to rent a storefront. Many landlords are just looking to cover their expenses and make a reasonable return. Expenses like insurance and re tax continue to spike, especially re tax. Futher, the pool of renters for commercial space is much smaller and more uneven than I would have thought before I owned my little store.
Stuff that sits vacant for really long periods is a different story. Could be incredibly unrealistic LL expectations, dispute among owners or heirs, general condition issues, etc.
Ok, well Mr. B also conveniently left off of the OTBKB write-up that the owners might be moving to Turkey.
That’s a fairly important bit of information when discussing a store closing.
I can’t keep up with these failures. It’s inundating.
***Bid half off peak comps***
Gem – That’s fascinating. I’ve wondered about that for a very long time ever since my fave pastry shop in the Village closed & the bldg sat vacant for literally 10 years!
I’m sad to see them go. The owners were really nice.
If that’s true, Gemini, Bloomberg should be making that priority numero UNO to change!
11217 – I beleive(I could be wrong) that landlords actually make more at tax time from writing off the loss of monthly income from their vacant storefronts than merely increasing the rent for the current shopkeeper….