BID Releases its own State of Georgetown 2015

Last week GM reveled his much delayed State of Georgetown 2015. GM’s proud of his efforts and all, but the fact is that the BID’s State of Georgetown 2015 is a million times better. Check it out here.

Here are some of the fascinating data points that their report contains:

Stuff is Busy:

There’s a lot going on in the commercial corridors of Georgetown. There was a net gain of 19 stores (which differs from GM’s count, but that’s because the time frame and geographies are different). The office vacancy is low at 7.1%. Hotel occupancies rose to 72%. There are 13,000 people employed in the BID zone. And additional 15,000 work in Georgetown outside of the BID zone (one assumes that mostly includes GU and hospital employees).

As for job sectors, the biggest increase in Georgetown jobs was in education, with a 14% jump over the previous year. The biggest drop was a tie between retail trade jobs and information at -13%.

Commercial rents raised slightly with Class A space demanding $44/sqf on average and Class B/C demanding $39/sqf. Here’s all the commercial space in map form:

The BID counts a bit fewer stores than GM due to the fact the BID doesn’t cover all of Georgetown. They count 469 stores. Not surprisingly fashion dominates with 26% of the stores. Decor and restaurants pull up second and third with 14% and 13% respectively.

Construction Boom:

There has been a lot of construction in Georgetown recently. Four major projects were completed over the past year or so. They combined to add 35 housing units with over 65,000 square feet of space.

There is a lot in the developmental pipeline. There are 264 housing units planned between five projects. That number is inflated mostly due to the microunit project planned for the Latham Hotel site.

Who Comes Here?:

The BID obtained data from all credit card swipes in Georgetown to find out the zip codes of the customer. Here’s where they’re from:

As you can see, the only red spot (i.e. very high concentration) is from DC itself and the surrounding suburbs. Among the high conentrations of visitors, however, were counties around the northeast corridor up to New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Other than those hot spots, visitors come from pretty much wherever there are people.

Internationally the biggest group of visitors are the Canadians and the Brits. Surprisingly only about 7% of spending in Georgetown comes from international visitors. A whopping 58% of business in Georgetown comes from the DC region itself.

These are just a few of the fascinating chestnuts contained in the report. Check it out!