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December 9, 2024 Deal Watch

Real estate investment/development giant Winstanley will bet on retail market in 2025

Adam Winstanley
By Michael Puffer

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, major industrial developer Adam Winstanley has a bullish outlook on the retail sector.

Winstanley — a principal of Massachusetts-based Winstanley Enterprises, which has been a prominent developer of large logistics buildings in Greater Hartford — said he plans to revive his company’s investments in retail properties over the coming year by buying multiple shopping centers along the East Coast.

He expects to soon close on the purchase of a Massachusetts shopping center anchored by department store Kohl’s, he said.

“My biggest initiative next year will be expanding more aggressively into retail shopping centers,” Winstanley said. “I’m closing my first deal before year’s end. We plan to buy six to eight shopping centers in 2025. That could be Connecticut, but I’m looking from Florida to New England.”

Winstanley Enterprises currently has six shopping centers in its portfolio, down from a high of 30, Winstanley said. Fourteen were sold off in the past several years, he said.

Retail is looking up, driven by a persistent appetite for open-air shopping centers and a lack of new construction since 2010, Winstanley said.

“Prior to 2008, (the U.S.) built 50 million square feet (of retail space) every quarter,” Winstanley said. “And then, when the mortgage crisis came (in 2008-09) and the rise of the internet started to grow, it went to zero.”

Retail rents declined from 2010 to 2020, and many stores closed, Winstanley said. But the trend has come “full circle,” and the U.S. is now seeing net store openings.

Cushman & Wakefield: retail market warm, not hot

Real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield’s third-quarter report on the national retail sector, however, noted some cooling of the recently hot market.

At the close of the third quarter, the national shopping center vacancy rate was 5.4%, flat from a year ago, while tenants relinquished a net 257,817 square feet of space during the three-month period that ended Sept. 30, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s report.

Through the first three quarters of 2024, absorption — which measures how much available space has been leased over a certain time period — has largely been flat, totaling 350,000 square feet.

Meantime, third-quarter retail rent growth moderated to 3.4% over the prior year, Cushman & Wakefield reported.

This suggests the market is rebalancing from a post-pandemic surge that saw rent growth peak at nearly 5% in late 2022, Cushman & Wakefield said.

Locally, Greater Hartford’s retail vacancy rate was 6.9% at the end of the third quarter, an improvement from a 7.5% vacancy rate in the second quarter of 2024, Cushman & Wakefield reported.

Greater Hartford tenants absorbed a net 181,027 square feet of available space during the third quarter. That reversed a slower leasing period during the first half of the year, when tenants shed a net 225,517 square feet of retail space, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

In New Haven County, the retail vacancy rate is 8%, a slight improvement from 8.1% in the prior quarter. Through the first three quarters of 2024, Greater New Haven tenants absorbed a net 18,176 square feet of space, Cushman & Wakefield data shows.

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