Commercial Turnover Way Down in 2013

GM is busy pulling together the State of Georgetown 2014, but he wanted to get the highlight out first: store turnover was way down last year.

GM does an annual census of stores, shops, restaurants, etc. Rather, GM normally does this survey. But this year the staff at the BID did it for themselves and shared it with GM. GM took that data and plugged it into his historic data to come up with trends. (Point of clarification, GM doesn’t do this on a calender year basis, but rather approximately on a February-to-February basis)

In 2012, there were 56 store closings and 43 store openings. In 2013, there were only 24 store closings, but also only 35 store openings. So closings were down sharply and openings were down slightly.

Overall that implies a much more stable market than we’ve seen in the past 4-5 years. For instance, in 2012 there were 79 store closings (although that number is inflated due to the mall closing).

GM will have more details later this week, but the one trends he sensed from tabulating the data is that 2013 saw a lot of long vacant spaces finally filled (which makes sense since there were fewer closings than openings, for the first time in years).

So before we get too much deeper, you can at least take away the fact that the overall picture is good. As we dig in, we’ll probably see that individual areas are hurting, though.