![]() ![]() Unknown is any long-term impact of inflation on shoppers and by extension demand for leases by retailers large and small. The Harbor Freight expansion was notable on another front: it took over the retail plaza space of Blast Fitness, with retail landlords having had success plugging fitness gyms into retail vacancies over the preceding decade, to include Planet Fitness in Danbury and Norwalk. But leading all retailers for revenue growth in 2021 was Harbor Freight Tools, which has included Connecticut in its rapid expansion including a new store in West Hartford in addition to the dozen it already has. While two of those have since left in Forever 21 and Brio - both after corporate bankruptcies - Dick's took over one floor of Forever 21, while Barbarie's Grill grabbed the Brio restaurant space.ĭanbury Fair fared well with another big-box outcome, drawing the European sale-price apparel chain Primark for the upper level of its one-time Sears department store, then more recently announcing Target would take the balance of the pad at 130,000 square feet of space.ĭollar General was the fastest-growing retailer in the country just prior to the pandemic, as tracked by the National Retail Federation, adding more than 900 stores in 2019 in its "small box" format of less than 10,000 square feet. Bean, the Cheesecake Factory and the restaurant chain now known as Brio Italian Grille. Perhaps no big-box conversion has been more successful in Connecticut than Danbury Fair's 2008 flip of its vacant Filene's store into a multi-unit wing that landed Dick's Sporting Goods, Forever 21, L.L. As of last month, the eight retailers with large-format stores had nearly 2,000 openings in Connecticut, about quadruple the number of openings at Amazon-owned facilities. While Amazon has cemented itself as a major employer in Connecticut the past 10 years, big-box retailers have far more heft in the aggregate. Cushman & Wakefield does not carve out the Fairfield County market on the study, which also found takers for an empty, freestanding Lord & Taylor store in Stamford, where Whole Foods will join Saks Off 5th which elected to open there on the heels of closing at the Stamford Town Center mall downtown. The New Haven region hasn't had the same performance on the Cushman & Wakefield study, entering the holiday season with about the same number of retail leases in place as it had exiting the last. Jordan's stores include side attractions such as the It aerial ropes adventure course at its New Haven store. Westfarms punctuated the Hartford area's recent run of success in landing the newest Jordan's Furniture, which is taking over the former Lord & Taylor space that was freed up in the department store's 2020 bankruptcy at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Northeast, that topped the combined lease performance for every Northeast market on the Cushman & Wakefield study save Providence, R.I., which had about twice as much activity. In its quarterly review of retail leasing nationally, brokerage Cushman & Wakefield calculated more than 250,000 square feet of shopping center space being leased up in the Hartford region over the first nine months of this year, on a net basis. It's starting to come back - I think it's sustainable." "From where we started, it's a tighter market today. "We had a wave of vacancies for a lot of different reasons, but now we're seeing rates starting to hold," said Sean Cahill, managing director in the Norwalk office of commercial real estate brokerage Avison Young, referencing retail lease rates. ![]() On Thursday, the Greenwich-based shopping center owner Urstadt Biddle Properties reported it had won a 19 percent increase in base rent at the Orange Meadows Shopping Center north of the Connecticut Post mall, where Homesense targeted its third Connecticut location in more than 20,000 square feet of space consolidated from five smaller units. Malls and older shopping centers in Connecticut and nationally continue to be vexed by the problem of big-box vacancies, as they weigh alternative uses like entertainment to fill space and perhaps attract a new mix of customers that might represent spillover business for adjacent stores.īut things could be looking up compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, when vacancies were mushrooming in malls and along big-box retail strips. ![]()
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