Manhattan Office Space for Lease Increases 38%, Cushman Says

[marmar]

Manhattan Office Space for Lease Increases 38%, Cushman Says
By David M. Levitt


Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- New York has 38 percent more square feet of offices for lease than a year ago, as the economic slump and job cuts at financial firms keep demand low, according to Cushman & Wakefield Inc.

Available space totaled 43.8 million square feet, or 11 percent of Manhattan’s 393 million square feet of offices, at the end of 2009, the New York-based brokerage said today in a report. The vacancies, equivalent to more than 15 1/2 Empire State Buildings, are the highest since the third quarter of 2004, Cushman said.

“We’re calling this close to the bottom,” said Joseph Harbert, Cushman’s chief operating officer for the New York region. “Rents will go down a bit from here, vacancies will go up a bit, but you won’t see any dramatic movements on either of those fronts in the next nine months.”

Demand in New York, the biggest and most expensive U.S. office market, went into freefall following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s September 2008 bankruptcy filing. New York has lost about 40,000 financial services jobs since the first quarter of 2008, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

The office market picked up later in the year as larger businesses began taking advantage of lower rents to renew leases early, Harbert said. In the second half of 2009, there were 9.9 million square feet of new leases signed, compared with 6.4 million in the first half, according to Cushman. There were 10 leases for more than 100,000 square feet in the fourth quarter, twice the number from the same period of 2008. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aStyY.jU6X10

[girl gone mad]

1. I think this photo from Calculated Risk sums it up.

[FarCenter]

2. With the new broadband and mobile devices, as well as cloud computing

Don't expect office jobs to come back.

There is no reason to have lots of people sitting at desks in front of personal computers anymore.

[Warpy]

3. The day of the 9 to 5 office beehive might be about over

since there is no earthly reason for people to commute and assemble to do work they can just as easily do at home in their bathrobes.

I guess they'll have to start figuring out how to refit gigantic office towers as loft housing they way they did for the better industrial space after the last work shift.

[marmar]

4. I've always wondered how long that was going to last.....

Office towers full of people, pushing paper from one floor to the next....I'm actually peeking into the adjacent office tower now, looking at rows of people tapping away at their computers. It's kind of depressing in an Orwellian sense.

[FarCenter]

5. The cubicle, aisle, floor, tower are the people equivalent of sheet, folder, drawer, and cabinet.

Office buildings are the extension of the paper world in the employee dimension.

As business processes are converted away from paper, the office building becomes obsolete.

[Warpy]

6. Yes, or just looking over a sea of desks that takes up a whole floor

in some glass clad box screwing up the skyline, been there, did the temp job when I got desperate. Cubicles weren't much better, but they did allow us to put up pictures of the kids, the house, the boat, or whatever we used to motivate ourselves to sweat our lives away pushing useless paper.

Ever see "The Crowd?" It's my favorite dystopian film, an old King Vidor silent job that's well worth looking for. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018806/

I can foresee better times when the top management occupies the top floor, the small on site staff occupies the three bottom floors, and the former worker bees have apartments with stunning views on the middle floors.

However, they'll have to be empty and blighted for a few years before we're allowed to move in.