Downtown Austin Market News
 

I was wondering if anyone had or knew were to find any sort of numbers on the growth of the retail in Downtown Austin over the past 20, 10 years or even past 5 years?

I posted this in another thread but the past two days while I was downtown I went by that Apple Store and both days the line was around the block. Yesterday I got in the line and it only took like 15 mins. It was really really fast. Faster than a line you would expect at an amusement park. And anyone that has ever been in an Apple Store knows they don't let you leave with out spending tons of cash. How long this line has been for days now, and how fast it is really has blown my mind in how many people must be going through that store and how much money it must be making.

I looked around a little on the internet for some sort of numbers on retail space, retail employees, retail occupancy and how much sales tax is made downtown but can't seem to find it or know where to look. And I would love to be able to find those numbers vs what they were 10 to 20 years ago. Anyone have a suggestion on where I might find what I am looking for?

Austin's CBD had 3,869,297 square feet of gross leasable area in 371 buildings as of the end of 2009. 85,957 sq. ft. of space was under construction. The vacancy rate was 4.1%.

The Austin market in total had 72,928,442 sq. ft. of GLA in 4,935 buildings. 767,498 sq. ft. was under construction. The vacancy was 6.8%.

http://recenter.tamu.edu/mreports/2010/AustinRRock.pdf

A new Tom Stacy story. He is looking to find a large retail store to fill the 17,000' space where the Austin Museum of Art is on Congress.

http://www.statesman.com/business/de...e=rss_business

i'll take a nice big H & M please!

That'd be nice.

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/pr...ntown-biz.html

the apple in that location is a perfect spot for downtown! a location there can certainly bring more people to that area during the weekdays. now people will not have to drive all the way to barton creek mall or the domain. i'm excited.

Not to burst everyone's bubble but this is NOT an Apple Store. This is a third party authorized retailer who will be selling Apple products. It certainly will not generate the foot traffic that a actual Apple store would. It might be a nice little shop that will serve that area nicely, but I certainly will continue to wait for an actual Apple store to launch in downtown.

My only concern is that when making the third party reseller agreement, the owners needed a guarantee from Apple that they wouldn't open a store (after all a real Apple store would annihilate any chance this store would have at success). Even if such a an agreement doesn't exist, I am sure the owners at least looked into if Apple was about to open a store downtown...I just hope this store doesn't signal that a real Apple store downtown (and the activity that would generate) is far from being a reality.

ABJ

:previous: and the very next sentence in that article is:

However, that article does mention

I shop at the oldest Target in Austin - Store #0096 on Ben White & South Lamar. That one's so old they don't even have conveyor belts at the checkout stands. One of the employees said it opened in 1979. It's supposed to be getting the expanded food section. From what I understand, the building will be enlarged to the east towards Victory Dr.

I wish they'd do something with the other shopping center along the east side of Lamar (Wells Fargo, Hancock Fabrics, Thrift Store, Harbor Freight Tools & the now closed Lacks Furniture store.) It's got that huge parking lot which is way underutilized for the few businesses that are left. And while they're at it, they should tear down that old Furr's Cafeteria, which has also gone out of business.

If you recall.... long before Whole Foods too over the site at 6th and Lamar...That was designed to be a Target... supposedly at the time one of the first "urban" Targets.

The sector of downtown that seems to make the most sense for an "urban" Target and/or a grocery store (or Trader Joe's) is the Green redevelopment. In its favor are a clean slate site, proximity to many of the existing (and coming) condos, and good accessibility via Cesar Chavez for those who visit by car.

Seems reasonable to think that Trammell Crow will explore all the "big retail" possibilities to fill a niche with their Green master plan. Even though such a store was explicitly mentioned in only one of the competing Green proposals, and it wasn't TC's, that hypothetical H-E-B did seem to capture the imagination of a lot of people.

Makes sense to me.

"old" :jester:;)

50+ years ago when we shopped at the really old Woolworth's store on the west side of Congress, if you made a purchase at a counter, the clerk put the sales invoice and your money in a pneumatic tube (like the modern bank drive-thrus use) which whisked it away to a central cashier. A minute later the change & receipt came popping back. The old wood floors creaked pretty loud and the planks were full of brass repair patches.

Over in Taylor in old Pruett's Hardware Store instead of a pneumatic tube, they used a similar container that was propelled around the store on an overhead system of wires. The clerk put the cash & invoice in the container and pulled down hard once on a cord handle which provided the energy to zip it over to the teller's cage.

That Woolworth's was still open in the very early 1980s. I believe it was torn down for One American Center.

This article states the occupancy rate for retail on 2nd Street is at 80 percent.

http://www.austin360.com/movies/seco...m-1426533.html

I'm not a big art house movie type fan, but my girl is very excited about that new VC cinema. So I see myself getting dragged there many times in the near future. :( lol.

Hopefully the food and drinks is as good as they are being advertised! And it is a hell of a lot closer than the cinema up north. Not sure if that is good or bad for me. :P

http://www.statesman.com/business/ur...e=rss_business

Oh, and on another note (not really retail, but real estate) I saw our own DAB mentioned on the Statesman. Grats!

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...office_do.html

I liked going to the Arboretum Cinema but I hated going to the Arboretum.

Trader Joe’s scouting for sites in Austin, other Texas cities