Houston Retail Market Should Top Out at Nearly 3 Million New SF

The city’s retail sector has recovered from the 1980s, when Houston’s glut of retail space forced many shopping center developers into foreclosure and bankruptcy, reports the president of one of the nation’s largest neighborhood and community shopping center companies.

Drew Alexander, president of Houston-based Weingarten Realty Investors also says that much of the vacant retail space in Houston may remain without tenants because of poor location and layout. Houston is also seeing a rapid expansion of the grocery sector, he adds, but a shake out is looming in that sector too.

“Overall, Houston retail seems to be in pretty good shape,” says Alexander, a past president of the International Council of Shopping Centers. “Overall retail occupancy is only about 88%, but when you take out the properties that were built in the early 1990s, retail occupancy is around 92%. Those centers that should never have been built skew the occupancy statistics.”