Reply to More profitable for DC landlords to "sit" on empty storefronts than rent at market rate??

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "More profitable for DC landlords to "sit" on empty storefronts than rent at market rate??"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Thank you for this insight, but I don't think it really answers why commercial landlords are charging astronomical rents per month and keep raising them, even when it then drives a restaurant that does "good" business out. Ie, the restaurant would stay if the rent didn't keep soaring to unobtainable prices. In our neighborhood weve ended up with only fast food and fast express (high volume businesses). And banks. How does adding more residential density change anything? A sit down restaurant can only seat so many at a time. Perhaps the rents are what need to to be looked at, and a penalty for properties that sit empty for ages.[/quote]

We live in a free market economy.  What you think of as an "astronomical" rent may in fact not be.  Landlords ask for the highest rent they think they can get.  Sometimes, especially with new developments or heavily leveraged refinancings, a landlord's lender has set rent levels within the loan documents so that the landlord has to try to obtain those rents and is willing to wait for months in order to get them.  Fast food and banks pay high rent.  Banks are great credit---they always pay the rent and they require much less than the average restaurant in terms of Tenant improvement allowances.  WaWa is a great example of a fast express user who set out 5 years ago on a major effort to compete with 7-11 in urban markets---they went into Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, G-town etc., with a willingness to pay a huge premium over the asking rents at the time.  [/quote]

We live in a freeish-market economy. Property rights are not absolute, and hardly anyone disputes that they should be. In particular, uses of property that adversely affect neighbors are highly regulated, the owners of those plots wouldn't be able to open a slaughterhouse or a junkyard there, in fact the scope of legal use under the zoning is quite constrained. It's hard to dispute that having a property sit vacant adversely affects the neighbors, it's just that our system of land-use regulation hasn't come up with a way of regulating it. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics