With the impending return of the Rams football team now official, the days of Inglewood’s sluggish real estate market could soon be coming to a close. In fact, some real estate insiders say they are already seeing signs of such a turnaround near Inglewood’s old Hollywood Park Racetrack—the future home of L.A.’s new football team.
"People are sharpening their pencils and seeing what they can do there," commercial real estate agent Matt Crabbs recently told the L.A. Times. "It's incredible,” he said, explaining that he’s already seen a flurry of interest in a vacant retail building that previously sat for months with no offers.
The price tag: $4 million.
Another property on Arbor Vitae is generating similar leads, according to local real estate agent Mike Talbot.
"The stadium is going to bring traffic flow and a lot of people from out of town," he said. "This is a chain reaction."
The new buzz is welcome news for the Westside suburb. Inglewood’s commercial real estate market has consistently underperformed in comparison with many surrounding areas. Retail space vacancies are at 5.9% with an average lease rate of $1.43 per square foot a month. The L.A. metro area has a 4.7% retail space vacancy rate with an average of $2.31 per square foot a month. Office spaces, meanwhile, fare even worse. The city’s office vacancy rate is 27.4% with an average lease rate of $1.61 per square foot monthly, compared to 11.2% and $2.71 for the L.A. metro area.
Still, it remains to be seen just how lucrative the overall impact of the new stadium will be. Many economists contend that such projects, even when not publicly funded, end up being poor investments in the long-run. Likewise, Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross, said we shouldn’t expect the positive effect on property values to extend beyond a half mile of the stadium.
The new 80,000-seat complex is slated to be the world’s most expensive sports arena at an estimated cost of $2.6 billion. It is supposed to be completed by the 2019 NFL season.
Read more about the economic impact of the Rams’ L.A. return here.
Image Credit: Flickr User banduki, https://flic.kr/p/iwYxad via (CC BY-ND 2.0)