Received confirmation from a broker familiar with the project that Design Within Reach is no longer coming to East Market. A huge loss, in my opinion. No further details given, so I have no idea what caused them to pull out and why we haven't heard about it. Construction delays? The general retail environment? I'd be curious for others in the biz to dig around more or maybe see if we can get some reporting on this from PBJ or the Inky.
A marketing flyer being circulated is marketing the space as office, medical, or retail, which seems like a very bad sign for the amount of retail demand they're seeing for this location. The floorplan from this flyer is attached:
http://sshrealestate.com/files/build...0Floorplan.pdf
This pretty much kills the whole "we're having a design/furniture/home goods-oriented angle for the retail scene" argument that was originally described with DWR's lease in early 2016. It also means that there are zero confirmed retail tenants for the first retail podium. With DWR as a leading tenant to indicate the caliber of tenants at the location, it seems doubtful tome that we're likely to get a great mix here. I imagine the Gallery's pivot is also problematic for them, as East Market cannot market their adjacency to any known quantity. If they could say, "the gallery definitely has these dozen retail tenants and this specific movie theater", they could claim some co-tenancy, but instead they have to say that they're down the block from an enormous H&M, an unnamed theater, and several hundred thousand square feet of question mark.
I guess as long as MOM's still opens, at least we have that....?