Cushman & Wakefield Report 38% Increase in Available Manhattan Office Space

Asking rents in Manhattan averaged $55.52 a square foot at the end of 2009, down 20 percent from December 2008.

Bloomberg.com recently reported that commercial firm Cushman & Wakefield said that Manhattan has 38 percent more office space for rent compared to one year ago. This increase in rented office space is due to Wall Street job cuts and a weak economy reduced demand, they reported. The vacancy rate in the fourth quarter was the same as in the third. 

The article quotes Cushman COO for the New York region Joseph Harbert as saying,“We’re calling this close to the bottom. 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.”

Reporter David M. Levitt reports that according to Cushman, in the second half of 2009, new leases were signed on 9.9 million square feet of space, compared with 6.4 million in the first half.

After vacancy rates rose to 11.4 percent at the end of October, these rates declined for the two succeeding months. Cushman reported the rate was 8 percent at the end of 2008.

Asking rents in Manhattan averaged $55.52 a square foot at the end of 2009, down 20 percent from December 2008. In Midtown Manhattan, asking rents fell 22.5 percent to an average of $61.82 a square foot, the report said. The vacancy rate was 12 percent, up from 8.5 percent a year ago and without much from the third quarter.

Levitt writes that the so-called taking rents among Midtown Manhattan’s Class A buildings, the top-quality space, have fallen 42 percent to $52 a square foot since the first quarter of last year. They climbed from $50 a foot in the third quarter, the first sequential rise in at least two years.

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