Diagnosing Retail Vacancy: It's More Than Just Rent

Walk through almost any city, and you will find at least one ground-floor retail space that has sat empty for a year or longer, long after the apartments or offices above it filled up. Ann Ehrhart, founder of EVERSTREET in Boston, Massachusetts, sees this constantly, and she says the cause is almost always more specific than developers assume.

“Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, when retail is chronically vacant or challenged or turns over, something in that equation is sick,” Ehrhart said. The equation she refers to is merchandising, design, and underwriting, and when those three elements are out of sync with each other or with the location itself, vacancy follows. Ehrhart’s firm does diagnostic work specifically for projects where the retail plan is not working as hoped. The process runs in reverse from her usual five-step framework, essentially reverse-engineering what went wrong. Sometimes the tenant outreach targeted the right kind of retailer, but the space was never designed to accommodate them. Other times the space and the tenant mix are both right, but the underwriting—the rent structure, the terms—are so far off that no tenant can actually make the numbers work. And sometimes merchandising, design, and underwriting are all internally consistent, but built for a Destination corridor when the property actually sits in an Untested one. “We always, in a diagnostic exercise, project assignment, take that formula, and we look at what the retail leasing strategy has been to date, and we diagnose which of those levers is problematic,” Ehrhart said. “Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s multiple.”

Once a storefront sits empty long enough, it can develop what Ehrhart calls a vacancy stigma, a reputation that makes it even harder to lease. The good news, according to Ehrhart, is that this is not necessarily a sunk cost. “You absolutely can bring a space back from the brink of that stigma, but you can’t do it without understanding what went wrong,” she said. The risk is trying to fix the symptom instead of the cause. Ehrhart pointed out that she regularly hears from owners who have already cycled through several leasing teams without changing outcomes. Swapping brokers while keeping the same underlying strategy in place tends to produce the same results. For an owner or developer sitting on dark storefronts today, Ehrhart’s advice starts with diagnosis, not action. Before bringing in a new leasing team or dropping rents further, the merchandising, design, and underwriting need to be evaluated together and measured against the specific corridor the property sits in. Rent reductions alone rarely solve the problem if the underlying mismatch is about tenant fit or corridor classification rather than price. Ehrhart’s framework treats the corridor type—Destination, Convenience, or Untested—as the fixed variable that everything else has to align with, since location is the one thing a developer cannot change after the building is already up. Even seasoned developers, Ehrhart said, tend to underestimate how expensive and irreversible retail decisions are, and how hard the outcomes are to predict without a structured process. “Retail decisions are very expensive and irreversible, and outcomes feel almost impossible to predict,” she said. That is precisely why she built a predictive modeling approach around market demand and location context, so those decisions can be evaluated up front instead of diagnosed years later. For developers and asset managers dealing with chronic ground-floor vacancy, the underlying message is that the fix is rarely as simple as a new broker or a lower rent. It requires figuring out exactly which piece of the equation—merchandising, design, or underwriting—is out of alignment with the corridor the property actually sits in. EVERSTREET is a Boston, Massachusetts-based retail leasing, strategy, and activation advisory led by Ann Ehrhart, a 20-year retail leasing veteran working with mixed-use developments across the Boston area and into new growth markets. Learn more at everstreet.co.