What Does a Market Building Vendor Pay in Rent?

This shot of the food court in City Market Building is from the mezzanine^

I got an interesting question from a reader who didn't want her name used yesterday: "Do you know what the average monthly rent is for a restaurant vendor in the city market building?"

I put that to Melinda Mayo of the Roanoke City Public information office and she came back with the following:

"Space is rented to Market Building vendors by the square foot. However food vendors and retailers pay at different rates. Food vendors pay $28 per square foot [per year] plus a common area maintenance (CAM) fee of $300 per month. Retail vendors are paying $24 per square foot, plus $250 per month for CAM fees.

"As their month-to-month leases have reached the 12-month period, CAM fees increased by three percent. Food vendor booth stalls range from 136 square feet (the smallest [about $4,000 a year]) to 1,438 square feet (the largest [nearly $40,564 a year]). There are three retail vendors: Seeds of Light, 435 square feet ; Gone Co-Co, 742 square feet ; and Azar 418 square feet ."

Ed Hall of Hall Associates, which rents a good bit of commercial property in Roanoke, says those rents "sound fine" in a competitive sense. "Small spaces go for a lot more per square foot than comparable large spaces would," he says. "You're looking at some very small spaces here and my guess is that it would cost about $15 [per square foot] just to have them open" for rental. Full service office space downtown, by comparison, would run $15 to $25 a square foot typically, says Hall, "but you really can't compare the two because they are so different."