614 Apartments In, the Navy Yard Is Turning Into Philadelphia's Next Retail Bet
Two residential towers just opened at roughly 40 percent leased, with 265,000 square feet of ground floor retail still to come behind them.
Korman Communities just opened AVE Navy Yard, 614 apartments split between AVE Normandy's 267 units and AVE Constitution's 347, on a $285 million build that took close to five years to get through planning and pulled a $30 million grant through Pennsylvania's PA SITES program. Leasing opened in April and the two buildings are sitting around 40 percent occupied. Studios start at $1,928, two bedrooms run past $3,700.
The apartments are the opening act. Ensemble and Mosaic are running a master plan across 109 acres of the Navy Yard that calls for 265,000 square feet of retail plus millions more square feet of office, lab and life sciences space, backed by $6 billion in investment over the next 15 to 20 years. Happy Bear Coffee Co. and Carlino's Specialty Foods have already signed leases, joining Navy Yard regulars DiNic's, Shop 543, Jharoka and Gatehouse. SEPTA's Route 45 started serving the campus in August, and a former naval receiving station is being converted into a Hyatt, both aimed at the isolation that kept retail thin here for a quarter century.
The Navy Yard already runs 17,000 employees across more than 150 companies, and the master plan targets 30,000 workers and 4,000 more residential units on top of what's built. Ground floor retail there is leasing today against a customer base that's still filling in month by month.
Source: Billy Penn, PhillyVoice
Why it matters
For a retailer willing to open ahead of the rooftops, Navy Yard ground floor space is priced for a neighborhood that hasn't finished filling in, and that gap closes every quarter more units lease up.
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