Reading vacancy on the Boulevard in shoulder season

On a Tuesday in November the New Boulevard can look abandoned from the pavement. Curtains are closed. The gym on the second floor of one stair keeps winter hours. Owners who live in Tbilisi telephone to say the building is “dead,” which is a mood, not a rent roll.

When we draw occupancy we still colour a unit empty if there is no lease. We do not, however, write a caption that treats November emptiness on a sea-view studio as the same event as a dark grocer in July. The grocer in July usually means a rent dispute or a failed fit-out. The studio in November often means the short-let calendar has stopped, which the owner already knew and had been calling a lull so as not to look at the rooms.

What the walk actually shows

Giorgi counts padlocks on storage cages, not feelings about the street. He notes whether the concierge is present after 18:00, because a building that cannot receive keys will not fill even in August. He dates any “for rent” paper still taped in a lobby; papers from June that no one has taken down are a different signal from a fresh notice.

The board then has two layers. Colour fields show occupied / empty / disputed. Captions under the Boulevard strip say which empties fall inside the coastal off-season. Families who wanted a single alarm find this irritating. It is still more useful than a percentage that hides the shop.

What we refuse to write

We will not put “market softness” on a sheet as a cause. If a particular entrance has four empty studios and the next entrance is full, the caption stays at the entrance. Shoulder season is a calendar. A dark stair in August is a problem that needs a name: access, smell, a lift out of service, a rent that was never signed.

Owners preparing a winter sitting should send leases that actually run through Easter, not the summer rate card. The colour fields change when those pages arrive.