TriBeCa Retail Rents Firming

Antique store signs on at rent 10% above last summer’s doldrums.

Rental activity in TriBeCa is picking up, and so are retail rents. A recent lease signed for space at 182 Duane St., between Greenwich and Hudson streets, is a prime example. Los Angeles-based Lucca Antiques just inked a five-year lease there for 2,500 square feet on the ground floor and 2,000 square feet in the basement. The storefront, which formerly housed furniture store Room, will be Lucca’s first New York outpost. The antiques store should open by April.

The asking rent for the ground floor was around $77 a square foot. That’s a roughly 10% bounce from average asking rents in the neighborhood last summer, when area rents were down as much as 30% from year-earlier levels.

“The TriBeCa market has picked up since the summer,” said ROXANNE BETESH, the Sinvin Realty broker who, along with colleague Sarah Shannon, represented landlord 182 Stelen Realty Co. “Rents are up a bit, and more deals are getting done.”

Robin Abrams and Joe Leinsdorf of The Lansco Corp. negotiated on behalf of Lucca.