COLUMBIA — Columbia’s downtown commercial buildings continued a trend of vacancy rates under 5% in 2025, according to data from Plaza Commercial Realty.
“The vacancy rate … is a good measure of how the market is performing,” said Paul Land, the president of Plaza Commercial Realty. “So the lower the vacancy rate, the better the market is performing.”
The realty group began tracking vacancy rates downtown in 2016 after requests from groups leasing spaces downtown.
The year it started, the downtown vacancy rate was 1.78%. Those rates have made a slight trend upward, with a rate of 2.79% in 2017 and a 4.65% rate at the start of this year. While still under 5%, that means vacancy rates are two and a half times higher than they were nine years ago.
There are myriad reasons for that, Land said.
“Could be a very large property within the boundaries of the downtown that changes it by a percentage or two,” Land said. “Sometimes it could be explained by what’s on an upper or a ground floor, as ground floors are usually leased easier than upper floors.”
As for the year 2016, Land said that “was an extraordinary occupancy level being unusually low,” most likely being explained by Goodwill’s high school learning center on Fourth Street taking over a large space.
“It could be that leases were done on longer term basis in 2016 versus leases that became shorter in 2020 due to COVID and business disruption. It could be a movement of certain business uses like lawyers or financial institutions favoring the downtown area then and suburban locations now,” Land said. “I don’t know that I can pinpoint a single factor.”
A vacancy rate of under 5% means at least 95% of commercial space is occupied.
As for what types of businesses are downtown, Land said there’s “no question that’s changed.”
“Businesses go where they’re welcome,” he said. “Retailers go where the demographics are important to them, so changes that have occurred are reflections of changes in the community.”
“We have a lot more vape shops, which we get a lot of complaints about,” said Nickie Davis, the executive director of The District.
But Davis said it’s common to see an inflow of new businesses types in downtown Columbia.
“It’s very normal to see, like every three years, an influx of one type of business,” Davis said. “There tends to be … maybe five different types of those same businesses, and then one would end up eventually staying, sticking around while the other ones closed.”
KOMU 8 requested documents from the city and The District detailing what businesses have occupied downtown over the past decade. Neither have this data recorded.
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