Published: October 2026 | Author: Patrick Frazer, Commercial Real Estate Broker | NH & Southern Maine
Retail was supposed to be the asset class in permanent decline. E-commerce was going to hollow it out. The pandemic was going to finish the job. Neither prediction came true in Southern New Hampshire — and heading into Q4 2026, the retail market here is as active as it has been in years.
That does not mean every retail property is winning. The gap between well-located, well-tenanted retail and everything else has never been wider. Understanding which side of that divide your property sits on — or which side you are buying into — is the whole game right now.
Here is a clear look at where Southern NH retail stands heading into the end of 2026.
The Big Picture: Busy and Getting Busier
The Fall 2026 forecast from retail specialists tracking the NH market is straightforwardly positive. New retail openings are happening across the state. New developments are underway or delivering. Consumer spending has held up, and retailers who survived the post-pandemic shakeout are in expansion mode.
The I-93 corridor from Manchester south through Salem continues to be the most active retail spine in the state. Tuscan Village in Salem keeps adding apartments, specialty retail, and restaurants — it has become a genuine regional destination rather than just a local center. Merchants Way at Exit 17 in Penacook is under development anchored by Market Basket, NH Liquor & Wine Outlet, and HomeGoods. In Nashua, the former Leda Lanes site has been redeveloped into three new retail buildings. The former Rockingham Park site in Salem has matured into a regional node drawing retail, restaurant, residential, and medical users.
These are not projects scraping by. They are active, leasing, and drawing tenants who would previously have defaulted to Massachusetts.
What Is Working: Service Retail and Experiential
The clearest lesson from the past five years of retail is that uses e-commerce cannot replicate are the ones filling space. In Southern NH, that means:
Food and beverage. Restaurants, coffee, fast-casual, and specialty food concepts continue to be the most reliable retail demand drivers. Independent concepts are filling holes that national chains left behind across Manchester, Portsmouth, and the Seacoast.
Service retail. Medical and dental offices, personal services, fitness, childcare, and financial services are among the most consistent tenants in Southern NH retail right now. These users need physical locations, generate foot traffic, and tend to sign longer leases than soft goods retailers.
Everyday needs anchors. Market Basket, Walmart, and the NH Liquor & Wine Outlet continue to be the most powerful anchors in this market. Centers with strong grocery or everyday-needs anchors are outperforming everything else. If your strip center has a functioning anchor generating weekly visits, you are in a structurally sound position.
Medical office in retail shells. One of the more interesting trends in Southern NH is medical users taking space in retail buildings — particularly former inline retail and anchor boxes. The footprint works, the parking ratios work, and the rents are often in line with what medical users pay in traditional office product. If you own a retail building with vacancy and have not considered medical tenants, it is worth the conversation.
What Is Struggling: Inline Soft Goods and Weak Locations
Not all retail is the same story. Two categories are genuinely challenged:
Soft goods retail in secondary locations. Clothing, gifts, home goods, and similar merchandise-driven retail is under real pressure from e-commerce. These tenants are not disappearing entirely, but they are downsizing, closing underperformers, and being far more selective about where they sign leases. If your center depends on soft goods tenants, tenant rollover risk is real.
Inline retail in centers that have lost their anchor. When an anchor goes dark, foot traffic drops and inline tenants feel it immediately. Centers that lost anchors during the 2020 to 2023 retail consolidation and have not replaced them are still working through the consequences. Re-anchoring with a non-traditional tenant — a gym, a medical user, a discount grocer — is the playbook that is working in this market.
Weak corridor locations. Not every Route 28 or Route 3 location is equal. Retail that is not near a traffic generator, lacks visibility, or sits in a stretch of road without a natural reason to stop is a hard lease regardless of market conditions.
The Development Picture: Scarcity Creates Opportunity
One of the understated drivers of retail performance in Southern NH right now is the scarcity of new supply. Ground-up retail development is expensive — construction costs have not come down meaningfully — and most of what is being built is either large-scale mixed-use or pad sites for national QSR and convenience users.
That scarcity benefits existing retail owners. Tenants who want to be in the market cannot always find new product, which keeps them in existing centers longer and supports rents. Class A retail in well-located corridors is not being replaced anytime soon.
For investors, that supply constraint is a real underwriting input. Buying into a well-located Southern NH retail center at a reasonable basis means you are not competing against new supply for tenants.
Q4 and the Holiday Season
October through December is the most important leasing window of the year for retail landlords. Retailers making location decisions for 2027 are doing it right now. The holiday season validates or challenges tenants’ performance numbers, and those results drive expansion and contraction decisions in Q1.
If you own retail space with vacancy heading into Q4, the next 90 days matter. Getting a tenant in before year-end — even on a short-term basis — is better than dark space through the holidays. Dark space signals weakness to other tenants and to customers.
If you are a retailer evaluating a new location, the leverage window is open. Landlords who have not filled space by now are motivated, and Q4 negotiations tend to produce better deal terms than the spring leasing season.
What This Means for Owners
The retail market is rewarding owners who are honest about their asset. A well-located center with good anchors and a maintained physical plant is in strong shape. A center with deferred maintenance, weak tenants, or a challenged location needs a realistic plan — whether that is repositioning, re-tenanting with non-traditional uses, or evaluating whether the land has a higher and better use under HB 631.
Retail valuations in Southern NH have held up better than most people expected three years ago. If you have been thinking about a sale or recapitalization, the current environment is more favorable than it may appear from the headlines.
What This Means for Investors
Southern NH retail is not the value trap it was perceived to be in 2020 and 2021. Service-anchored strip centers with strong in-place income, good locations along active corridors, and reasonable physical condition are trading and performing.
The risk is in buying on the wrong thesis — betting that soft goods retail will return to 2019 levels, or that a dark anchor box will lease easily. Underwrite to who is actually in the market today, not who was there ten years ago.
Cap rates for quality Southern NH retail have compressed modestly as investor confidence has returned. Well-located, grocery-anchored or service-anchored product is the most competitive to buy.
Patrick Frazer is a commercial real estate broker covering New Hampshire and Southern Maine across all asset classes. If you own retail property and want to understand what it is worth and what your options are, reach out.