BID Releases ‘State of Georgetown’ 2013

Last week, Georgetown Business Improvement District released its first “State of Georgetown Report 2013.”

According to the BID, it is “a compilation of statistics and analysis about key features of the Georgetown economy: people and employment; office and retail activity; hospitality and tourism, and; transportation. The report will help inform decisions by the BID’s members, as well as brokers, potential investors and tenants and the District government. This inaugural edition shows that Georgetown remains D.C.’s premier retail and accommodation destination and continued to attract new and dynamic businesses that serve residents, tourists and visitors in 2012 and the first half of 2013.”

The following are key highlights about Georgetown from the BID’s 2013 report:
= Businesses in the 0.25 square mile Georgetown BID area support over 11,000 jobs; immediately adjacent to the BID, Georgetown University supports around 10,000 additional jobs on 0.16 square miles. This density of jobs is similar to areas near Dupont Circle, Shaw, and the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.

= Within a three-mile radius of Wisconsin and M, a rapidly growing cohort of 25- to 34-year-olds now comprises 54,000 households with $3.6 billion of disposable income. Determining how to remain relevant to this powerful group of consumers will require thinking about a variety of topics: transportation preferences, retail trends, employment patterns and marketing strategies.

= Georgetown has 440 retailers, comprising more than two miles of store frontage; in 2012, 26 new retail businesses opened in the BID area, a net gain of nine from the previous year.

= Average office rents remain among the lowest of the regional submarkets at $40.93 per square foot; at the end of 2012, the average rent in Georgetown was 22.1 percent less than Downtown-East End.

= Georgetown hotels generate a disproportionate amount of revenues relative to other hotels in D.C., as they represent only 2.8 percent of D.C.’s total hotel rooms but generate 3.9 percent of D.C.’s total hotel revenues. In 2012, hotel revenues generated $8.8 million in hotel sales taxes.

“We are very excited to launch the very first ‘State of Georgetown.’ “ said Joe Sternlieb, CEO of the Georgetown BID. “With each subsequent, annual edition our knowledge of the commercial district will deepen, and our decisions can be increasingly well informed. This sort of data is extremely important for efforts like Georgetown 2028, our 15-year visioning process.”