Retail Market
Salt Lake Retail Market Data
Vacancy, asking rent, and cap rates for the Salt Lake City retail market, split by subtype. Every figure dated and attributed.
Dated figures. Salt Lake City, UT market (per CoStar). Q2 2026, retrieved July 30, 2026.
Retail is the tightest of the three asset classes in this valley at 3.4%, with 2,431,858 SF standing empty against 70.7M SF of inventory.
There is 867,010 SF under construction, so the space being added is going into a market that has very little sitting empty.
Retail by subtype
Power center is the tightest thing in the valley
Retail centers come in four types: neighborhood centers, power centers, malls, and strip centers. General retail sits in the table alongside them, freestanding and single-tenant rather than a center. The spread across the subtypes is wider than the market rate suggests.
Power center sits at 1.1% on 5.97M SF, which is the lowest vacancy rate of any subtype in any asset class on this site. Malls are the loosest at 5.5% on 5.05M SF. General retail is more than half the market by inventory at 37.97M SF and runs 2.8%.
Rent does not track vacancy here. General retail is the cheapest subtype at $25.21 and the second tightest at 2.8%, across 37.97M SF, which is more than half the market by inventory. Power center is tighter still at 1.1% and asks the most at $27.69, so the cheap space that is also hard to find is general retail rather than the market as a whole.
| Subtype | Inventory | Vacancy | Asking rent |
|---|---|---|---|
| General retail | 37,970,687 SF | 2.8% | $25.21 |
| Neighborhood center | 16,802,818 SF | 4.8% | $26.98 |
| Power center | 5,972,232 SF | 1.1% | $27.69 |
| Malls | 5,050,083 SF | 5.5% | $27.31 |
| Strip center | 4,311,416 SF | 3.4% | $25.62 |
| Market | 70,689,359 SF | 3.4% | $26.05 |
The named subtypes account for 70,107,236 SF of the 70,689,359 SF market. 582,123 SF, about 0.8 percent, sits in no subtype CoStar names, so it is shown as a gap rather than folded into a row.
CoStar prints neither an availability rate nor absorption by retail subtype, so those columns are absent rather than estimated.
Absorption
Size the give-back before reading anything into it
Retail gave back -43,500 SF over the trailing twelve months, and that figure gets a denominator rather than a narrative.
43,500 SF against 70.7M SF of inventory is six hundredths of one percent, and against the 2,431,858 SF already vacant it is under two percent. That is one mid-size box moving out, which is inside the noise for a single period in a market this size. It is not evidence that retail is softening, and a landlord who is told otherwise should ask for the trend rather than the quarter.
Against office
The gap is narrower than a rent roll makes it look
Retail and office asking rents are within forty cents of each other and they are moving in opposite directions.
Office asks $26.44/SF/yr and retail asks $26.05/SF/yr. If you own office and you have been pricing against retail comps, that gap is narrower than it looks on a rent roll, because office quotes here are usually full service and retail quotes are usually NNN. The tenant pays the operating costs either way; the only question is which side of the rent number they sit on.
Full service and NNN are quoting conventions rather than CoStar figures, and the rent figures themselves are theirs.
A tenant looking for space reads these numbers the other way round. At 3.4% vacant the exclusives and the co-tenancy decide the shortlist before the rate does, and tenant representation is how we run that search.
Own retail in this valley?
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