Walk the west side of Broadway between Spring and Prince and you'll pass a storefront that spent years as one of the busiest sneaker shops in the city. It's empty now, wrapped in construction plywood, waiting on a tenant that has nothing to do with sportswear. Ingka Investments, the group that owns most IKEA stores worldwide, paid $213 million for the building at 529 Broadway this year. The corner that used to sell you running shoes is becoming a furniture showroom.
That single transaction says more about what's happening in SoHo right now than any vacancy chart. The neighborhood's retail corridor is tightening and expanding at the same time. Broadway is absorbing bigger, slower-moving, more capital-intensive tenants than it has in years, while the streets one block over keep adding a different mix of retail.
The Corner That Keeps Changing Hands
Nike didn't leave SoHo. It moved four blocks north. After abruptly closing its long-running 529 Broadway flagship earlier this year, the brand reopened on April 16, 2026 at 611 Broadway, at the corner of Spring Street. The new store is built to change with the calendar, with interior treatments tied to the US Open and FIFA World Cup, plus a dedicated space for in-person customization through Nike's By You program. It's a store designed to be photographed differently every few months, which tells you something about who Nike expects to walk through the door: not primarily a resident restocking running shoes, but a visitor whose trip to SoHo is the point.
The building Nike left behind is now mid-transformation into something else entirely. Ingka Investments is converting the 53,000-square-foot property into a mixed-use building, with IKEA taking the first two floors, about 25,000 square feet, and the upper four floors being renovated into premium office space. Peter van der Poel, managing director of Ingka Investments, quoted by 6sqft, framed the purchase as part of a broader pattern: "This marks Ingka Investments' fourth acquisition of prime commercial real estate to support IKEA's growth in the world's leading cities." The building itself, originally developed by Aurora Capital Associates and renovated by BKSK Architects, has drawn praise from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission for pairing a terra-cotta facade and glass curtain wall with SoHo's cast-iron heritage. No opening date has been set. The building's second life as an IKEA is still a construction site, which means the storefront that used to move the fastest foot traffic on that block will sit dark for a while longer.
Everything Else That Landed on Broadway Over the Past Year
Nike and the incoming IKEA are the two biggest moves, but they're not isolated. The corridor has absorbed a run of flagship-scale openings over the past year, each one leasing more square footage than the tenant it replaced.
| Brand | Address | Opened | Notable detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calvin Klein | 530 Broadway | December 9, 2025 | 3,000-square-foot lifestyle flagship with SoHo-exclusive graphics |
| Skin1004 | 470 Broadway | May 11, 2026 | US flagship, fit-out drew more attention than the product wall |
| Nike | 611 Broadway | April 16, 2026 | Calendar-driven interior tied to US Open and FIFA World Cup |
| Kiko Milano | 430 West Broadway | September 2026 | First permanent NYC store in over a decade |
Each of these deals reflects the same underlying math. Median asking rent on SoHo's Broadway corridor hit $726 per square foot in the second half of 2025, a 24 percent jump in six months and within 12 percent of the neighborhood's all-time 2016 peak. Vacancy on the corridor has tightened to a record-low 8 percent as of the second quarter of 2026, tying SoHo with Madison Avenue for the tightest prime retail availability in Manhattan. Brands willing to sign at those numbers aren't chasing convenience. They're chasing visibility.
Why the Kiko Milano Comeback Is the Same Story as the Rent Chart
The following account is based on a Hoodline report: Kiko Milano's new flagship at 430 West Broadway is worth sitting with, because the brand's own history makes the bet more legible. Kiko's US subsidiary filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2018, shuttering the last of its 28 American locations soon after. The brand spent years rebuilding through e-commerce before signing a long-term lease this spring for 1,850 square feet at 430 West Broadway, a boutique property developed by United American Land and designed by Morris Adjmi Architects. The store itself runs 1,700 square feet, done in a lilac-toned design with Madonna as brand ambassador, and it marked its opening weekend of September 5 through 7 with free products for the first 500 Saturday visitors, custom engraving and DJ sets.
A brand built on sub-$20 lipsticks signing one of the more expensive retail leases in the country isn't a contradiction. It's the same logic driving Nike's calendar-reactive store design and the incoming IKEA conversion: the rent buys a place in a district that draws more than 12 million visitors a year, and each of these stores gives those visitors a reason to stop. A lipstick counter, a sneaker studio and a furniture showroom now share the same stretch of Broadway, which says a lot about how many kinds of brands want a SoHo address.
Home and Design Retail on Howard Street
None of this is happening on Howard Street, which is where SoHo's home and design retail keeps landing instead. GreenRow, a Williams-Sonoma portfolio brand, opened its first-ever brick-and-mortar store at 47 Howard Street this spring, with a grand opening weekend running March 6 through 8. The store is built around FSC-certified solid wood furniture and responsibly sourced textiles, designed, in the company's words, to feel like a lived-in home rather than a showroom. A portion of opening weekend proceeds went to the New York Botanical Garden.
GreenRow joins a cluster that's been building quietly since 2014: the SoHo Design District, roughly two dozen member showrooms that don't chase Broadway-level visibility because their customers already know where to find them. The district's centerpiece event, SoHo Design Night, ran on May 15 this year and brought together Amura, Bang & Olufsen, Calico, Foglizzo, Foscarini, GreenRow, HOST on Howard, Lemieux et Cie, Nordic Knots, Original BTC, Orior and Roll & Hill in a single evening. None of those names will show up in a REBNY rent report. Together, they add to the mix of home and design retail on the blocks off Broadway.
What the Prince Street Numbers Reveal
Even within SoHo, the money isn't distributed evenly. Prince Street rents averaged $1,408 per square foot in the second quarter of 2026, according to CBRE, nearly double Broadway's $726 figure and second only to the $2,540 per square foot commanded on the priciest stretch of Fifth Avenue citywide. That gap explains why the biggest institutional real estate moves in SoHo this year happened on Prince rather than Broadway. Ralph Lauren and LVMH were reportedly in a bidding war for 109 Prince Street in April 2025. Nine months later, Declaration Partners and Hilltop Real Estate signed a 25-year master lease at 113-121 Prince Street worth more than $50 million, a deal built for decades rather than a single opening weekend.
Broadway is where retail brands buy attention. Prince Street is where institutional capital buys permanence. Howard Street is where a resident buys a lamp.
The building at 529 Broadway sits between all three of those instincts right now, half-demolished, waiting to become something the neighborhood hasn't had before. What replaces a sneaker flagship in a landmark cast-iron building says something about where SoHo thinks its next decade of foot traffic is headed, and for now, the answer is still under construction.
If you're watching how these shifts in SoHo's retail corridor ripple into building values and co-op pricing on the surrounding blocks, Josue Gonzalez tracks that intersection closely and is glad to talk through what it means for a specific address.
