From the June issue: The national economy is humming along, but all the positive signs — a jump in home sales and prices, soaring consumer confidence and a new stock exchange record — have barely budged Manhattan’s office-leasing market. [more]

Midtown Manhattan

From the May issue: Office-leasing brokers have been blaming Midtown’s lackluster activity on Sixth Avenue for some time. Yet it’s now becoming clear that the percentage of available space on several neighboring avenues is higher than it is on Sixth — and it’s rising.

At the start of last month, the percent of available Class A office space along Sixth Avenue hit 12 percent. But the availability rate — which measures the amount of office space that’s available or will become available over the next 12 months — was even higher along Madison, Third and Fifth avenues. [more]

Peter Hennessy of Cassidy Turley and One New York Plaza

Office leasing in Manhattan plummeted by as much as a third in 2012, as large companies pulled back from major deals. Brokers broadly blamed the decline on the climate of political and economic uncertainty this year. Preliminary figures for 2012 show office leasing activity declined by 33 percent to 26.8 million square feet this year — compared to 40.7 million square feet in 2011, data from commercial services firm Cassidy Turley show. [more]

From left: James Wacht of Lee & Associates and Bruce Mosler of Cushman & Wakefield

From the September issue: Office leasing volume will almost certainly go up in September, brokers say, but that’s in part because of how far it dropped last month.

Indeed, the level of office leasing nearly collapsed in August, as Manhattan tenants and landlords signed just 775,357 square feet of renewal and relocation leases — the lowest all year, preliminary data from commercial firm Cassidy Turley shows. That figure represents only about a quarter of the average monthly volume of 2.8 million square feet over the past five years. August’s tally was also less than half of the 1.8 million square feet leased in July. [more]

From the June issue: Midtown South has done the heavy lifting so far this year to bring down the availability rate in the Manhattan office market. Midtown and Downtown, on the other hand, have not performed as well.

In fact, Midtown South — which has gotten a lot of attention lately because of its popularity with technology and media firms — has represented 73 percent of the positive office space absorption in Manhattan through the first four months of the year, commercial data firm Cassidy Turley reported. [more]

From the May issue: Two big office deals — each for more than 1 million square feet — provided a statistical lift that ended an extremely slow three-month leasing stretch in Manhattan. Indeed, last month saw 4.9 million square feet of Manhattan office space leased, compared to 6.1 million square feet for all of January, February and March combined.

Contributing to the uptick was media giant Viacom, which signed a 15-year renewal and lease expansion last month that runs through 2031. The move will ultimately give the company the entire 1.6 million-square-foot office portion of SL Green Realty’s 1515 Broadway. [more]

Tenants and landlords quietly added millions of square feet to the Midtown market, pushing up the amount of available space by a sizable 2.1 million square feet in the first quarter, figures from commercial firm CBRE Group released today reveal. The newly available blocks of space fueled the largest amount of negative net absorption since the second quarter of 2009 in the midst of the economic slowdown, an analysis of CBRE data by The Real Deal shows. [more]

John Sikaitis of Jones Lang LaSalle

Thanks to poor performances in some of its largest cities, the United States office leasing market had a slow first quarter, according to a national office market report released today by Jones Lang LaSalle.

Just about 1 million square feet of office space was absorbed nationwide in the first quarter, well below the 8.6 million square feet averaged over the previous six quarters. Net absorption fell by 2.2 million square feet in New York, Chicago and Washington D.C., with the latter recording 1.47 million square feet of negative absorption. Further, leasing activity in New York and Washington D.C. fell 43 percent quarter-over-quarter, the report says. [more]

From left: David Lebenstein, senior managing director at Cassidy Turley, and John Pavone, vice president at UGL

In the first two months of 2012, 2.9 million square feet of commercial leasing activity was recorded in Manhattan, trailing the year-over-year numbers by 31 percent, according to numbers from CBRE Group’s Manhattan Marketview Snapshots, released today.

February saw 190,000 square feet of negative absorption, although February’s 1.47 million square feet of total activity was a slight increase from January’s 1.44 million square feet. Asking rents in Manhattan rose negligibly, by $0.16 per square foot, to $54.40, the report says. [more]

(source: Jones Lang LaSalle)

Buoyed by the city’s growing technology sector, Midtown South was the strong point in a Manhattan office market that stagnated in February, according to a report released today by Jones Lang LaSalle.

After a brief respite from tightening conditions last month, the vacancy rate in Midtown South fell to 6.6 percent from 6.9 percent, as Class B space was in particular demand, with just 6.4 percent of the 48.6 million square feet of inventory. [more]