The Closure of Retail Frontage in Fayette County
Retail vacancy on the Nicholasville Road corridor has reached a five year low, and the frontage is closing.
Current retail vacancy rates in the Nicholasville Road corridor have reached a five year low. We have observed 398 feet of Main Street frontage change hands in the last quarter, and the corridor pads that sat vacant in 2021 are leasing at rents the prior landlords did not believe they would see.
The closure is the frontage. The retail that is trading is the frontage with the traffic count and the access, and the retail that is not is the dated strip product the market has passed by. The two are not the same market, and the vacancy number that blends them hides the one that is closing and the one that is not.
We track the frontage by corridor in The Quadrangle, because the corridor is the unit the market trades in. A citywide vacancy number is an average of markets that do not average, and the investor who underwrites to the average will pay full price for the corridor that is not turning.
The US 27 corridor in Jessamine County has absorbed a decade of retail and medical growth, and the frontage is nearly built out.
Danville's bypass carries the industrial and the corridor retail, while the downtown holds on the stewardship of its owners.