Ashley Thomas and Morgan Perkins were teaching baking classes and crafting their croissants and fruit galettes for local coffee shops out of Thomas' home in Ormewood Park when the pandemic hit. They decided to seize what looked like the opportunity of a lifetime to find a dedicated retail space in East Atlanta for their business, Galette. But the search for a storefront turned out to be an odyssey more difficult than they ever imagined. After more than three years of searching, Thomas and Perkins signed a lease last month for 1,200 SF in Downtown Avondale Estates for Galette's first location, expected to open this summer. “It was very different than my expectations going into this,” Thomas told Bisnow. “With the pandemic, it was my expectation that [stores] would be closing. It was very much the opposite.” 
Galette's story is an increasingly common one in Metro Atlanta, where only 3.4% of the market's retail space is vacant, according to Cushman & Wakefield, the lowest figure on record since the brokerage began tracking it in 2000. In the first quarter of 2020, vacancy was 12.3%. “There’s just a dearth of… Read the full story here. | 
