Top Retail Cities in Marin

Continuing our look at the retail sales tax data for Marin County from the California Board of Equalization (great name by the way). The table below shows total sales at retail outlets by city for the years 2006-07. So what is it telling us?

• San Rafael captures the largest slice of retail sales, with $1.3 billion or 38% of sales in Marin in 2007. San Rafael extends over quite a large area, which includes the downtown area, Northgate Mall, the big box retail along 101, Montecito Plaza and Home Depot.
• Novato is the second largest city, with 18% of the total, or $595 million. Most of this is drawn through Vintage Oaks.
• Corte Madera, with sales of $450 million, or 14% of the total, takes third place.
• The city with the greatest increase in sales was San Anselmo, with growth of $9.9 million, or 14% between 2006 and 2007. I don't recall any major retail changes taking place, so I wonder if the change reflects the impact of the floods on New Years Day 2006, which took out many downtown businesses for several weeks.
• Mill Valley also had a good 2007, up $6.9 million or 3.7% in 2007, possibly as a result of new store openings at Strawberry Village.
• Corte Madera recorded the greatest fall in sales over the period, down $4.2 million or 0.9% in 2007. This may reflect refurbishment work at the Town Center (Barnes & Noble) and The Village, which went through a program of renovations in 2007.

The BoE data also provides details of sales by retailer category. Unfortunately, the Board is in the process of changing how it classifies businesses, so we can't do a meaningfull comparison with previous years. I'll publish some charts with this data later this week.