Park Slope Retail Rents Are Going Up On 7th Ave., Down On 5th, Report Says

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — The prime real estate for businesses in Park Slope is along Seventh Avenue, while Fifth Avenue is getting a little bit cheaper, according to numbers in a recent report on neighborhood real estate.

The average asking rent for ground-floor retail on Seventh Avenue has jumped 35 percent, from $96 per square feet in winter 2016 to $129 in winter 2017, according to the report, from the Real Estate Board of New York. The asking rent actually dropped a little bit during winter and summer of 2016, from $96 to $92, before shooting back up.

On Fifth Avenue, average ground-floor retail rents went from $85 last winter to $79 this summer and have dropped another dollar since, the data shows.

The report looked at commercial real estate prices on 15 Brooklyn "corridors" and said rents increased in seven of them. In Park Slope, the report considered both Seventh and Fifth Avenues between Union Street and Ninth Street.

"This increase to $129 per square foot was a result of very low inventory on the corridor," the report says about Seventh Avenue. "According to our Brooklyn Retail Report Advisory Group, the few available spaces were clustered in more desirable locations, which drove the average asking rent for ground floor spaces upward and could cause the pace of deal making to decelerate."

And as DNA Info (where we first spotted the report) notes, Seventh Avenue has recently added chains such as Chipotle and Starbucks while other local staples have left the neighborhood's major thoroughfare.

The real estate report also cautions about reading too much into short-term changes.

"Although this report shows changes in average asking rents in most of the corridors analyzed, we must stress
that a change between two consecutive periods does not necessarily indicate a change in the market," the report says. Such short-term fluctuations may only be the result of spaces coming on or off the market. However, as we build historical data, we can identify long-run trends that suggest a gradual market shift."

You can read the report in full here.

Image: Seventh Avenue in October 2016, via Google Streetview