This year’s most lucrative retail leases look different from the usual Manhattan fare.
Generally an apparel or beauty store appears at the top of the list. Or, like last year, a luxury retailer.
But this year, decidedly unsexy big-box operators dominated the charts.
And though many retailers were wary of expansion, some were bullish. Target, for example. The big-box retailer had four of the 10 most valuable retail leases this year, ranked by annual rent.
“While the transaction volume was down significantly in 2020, the deals that were done, they all have a common thread, and that is spaces that were leased were of the highest quality,” said Richard Skulnik of RIPCO, who represented Target in the deals. “I would say there was a flight to quality during 2020 for transactions that were completed.”