Honolulu-based developer Avalon Group announced a plan in February to turn the upper two-thirds of the building into 300 to 400 residential condos for sale after paying $96 million to buy the 22-story tower with 378,000 square feet of leaseable space. “A lot of people got kinda down on downtown during the pandemic, and I kinda feel the pendulum is swinging back the other way,” said Jamie Brown, president and owner of local brokerage firm Hawaii Commercial Real Estate LLC.īrown’s office is located in Davies Pacific Center, a tower slated for partial conversion to residential condominiums. Since then though, the grocery and convenience store 88 Ranch has opened in the former Longs space, interest has been strong in the Walmart property, and several office conversion projects are in progress or planned. The vacancy rate in the central business district hit 14% at the end of last year from 11.7% in 2019, according to the report.Īll this weakness had negative effects on the biggest retailers downtown and contributed to Walgreens closing its Hotel Street store several years ago, followed by Longs Drugs at the Executive Centre last year and Walmart on Fort Street Mall in April. Oahu’s office vacancy rate, which had improved to 9.9% in 2019 from around 13% during much of the prior decade, jumped back to historically high territory at 12.9% at the end of 2022. ![]() ![]() Three months after the world’s largest retailer pulled out of Honolulu’s central business district, negotiations are pending to buy Walmart’s former downtown site.Ī new owner could be a developer or an owner-user in retail or another business category, and a successful deal, if reached, would become part of a shift in the community where sapped demand for office space is being filled by new housing and hotel projects that could revive a battered retail market.Ĭommercial real estate brokerage firm Colliers International has reported that from 2020 to 2022, Oahu’s office market - largely concentrated downtown - lost over 240,000 square feet of occupied space, driven mainly by around 9,900 lost office jobs at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a partial rebound of about 5,800 jobs by the end of last year.
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