News

Retail Trends in Fayette County

by Matt Forshee • April 29, 2008

In an earlier article, I wrote about trends in office growth, citing a study performed by the Atlanta Regional Commission. In that same study, they also looked at retail trends.

At the FCDA, we don’t normally get involved in retail recruitment. We believe that by creating local employment in office and industrial, we create a need for more retail services. Quite simply, retail follows the office and industrial jobs we help bring to Fayette. But I thought these trends were interesting enough for us to report, since retail development is often in the news.

In 2000, Fayette county had over 5.88 million square feet of usable retail space. With a population of 91,263 people, that equated to 64.4 square feet of retail space per person. During that same year, the 20 county metro area had 204.5 million square feet of retail, 4.2 million people and an average of 48.4 square feet of retail per person. In fact, in 2000 we were 2nd in average retail square feet per person in the entire 20 country metro area. We also were 6th in vacancy rates, meaning there were only 5 counties with higher average vacancy rates than Fayette, which was 4.6%, the same as the overall metro average.

By 2007, we had increased our usable retail space to 6.89 million, an increase of just over 1 million square feet in seven years, or a 17.3% change over 2000. With 105,400 people, that equated to 65.4 square feet of retail space per person, an increase of 1.55%. The overall metro average for 2007 was 49.2 square feet of retail per person, an increase of 1.65%. We stayed in 2nd place for average retail space per person. The national average is 20 square feet per person.

Yet during that same time, we dropped from 6th in average vacancy rates to 19th, meaning there were 18 counties with higher vacancy rates than Fayette and only one with a lower vacancy rate (Coweta). Our vacancy rate had actually risen too to 5.5%.

The report appears to show that, though we have more retail space per person than nearly every other county in metro Atlanta, our spaces are staying occupied at a higher rate than nearly every other county’s. Does this partially explain why commercial developers continue to show interest in developing retail centers in Fayette?

Tagged: retail, fayette county, arc