Franklin Street’s Kaelyn Sreenan, Senior Associate of Retail Services, recently chatted with Jacksonville Daily Record on how Jacksonville’s retail market continues to prevail in 2022 as record population growth and restored consumer demand show a strong performance across the board, despite previous challenges from the pandemic.
Kicking off 2023, retail in North Florida is still very much on fire.
Our market remains highly competitive with retailers ranging from franchise-driven concepts to national brands to local mom-and-pop shops all vying for space.
The fourth quarter of 2022 closed out the year with an average vacancy rate of 3.9%, slightly up from the previous quarter yet still lower than the national average of 4.2%.
Despite increased construction costs and continued supply chain delays, the appetite for new store development in our market is extremely high. This is especially true in fast-growing submarkets like St. Johns County, where new retail construction simply cannot be built fast enough to meet the demand created by new single-family and multifamily construction.
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Junior anchor spaces between 10,000 and 15,000 square feet are in high demand, with users such as Five Below, Ulta and Pet Supplies Plus, and although many retailers are “rightsizing” their footprints, we are beginning to see an uptick in interest in big-box spaces, which had been a challenge to lease in recent years.
Our team at Franklin Street is extremely positive on the year ahead. Some of the areas we’ll be watching include Downtown, where projects like the VyStar Credit Union parking garage will add to the district’s increasing vibrancy, as well as St. Johns County, where numerous mixed-use developments, like Beachwalk, are sure to entice national names to our region.
— Jaxdailyrecord.com
