Retail Sales Research Brief

Consecutive months of broad growth encouraging. Households increased their spending across a broad spectrum of stores in May, supporting a 0.4 percent rise in core retail sales. For the second straight month, eight categories registered sales growth, a testament to consumers’ spending power. The addition of 339,000 new jobs last month, the most since January, played a role in aiding households' purchasing power. A 4 percent rise in headline CPI inflation, the lowest annual rate of increase in more than two years, is also lifting consumer sentiment. Moving forward, easing inflationary pressures and a still-tight labor market bode well for single- and multi-tenant property performance, driving demand for what is a historically limited volume of available space.