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]

Graph provided by Alliance for Downtown New York

Commercial office leasing in Lower Manhattan totaled 5.86 million square feet in 2011, an 80 percent increase over 2010, according to a report by the Alliance for Downtown New York.

Thirteen of the top 20 leases for the year were for over 100,000 square feet, the Alliance said, while total office vacancy for the area ended the year at 9.5 percent, down from 9.9 percent in the second quarter of 2011 and 11.5 percent in the last quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield, Lower Manhattan also maintained its ranking as the business district with the third-lowest vacancy rate in the nation. [more]

Asking rents in the Manhattan office leasing market continued to rise in January while vacancy rates tightened, even as total activity appeared to slow from last year’s overall brisk pace, data from commercial services firm Cassidy Turley shows.

“It certainly seems slower than normal, but some major deals were done,” Robert Sammons, vice president for research at Cassidy Turley, said. [more]

From left: Marc Packman of Trinity Real Estate and 200 Hudson Street

Midtown South, which already has the lowest vacancy rate of any market in the country for office space, is nurturing a hub for New York City’s tenants du jour — the creative class — and the rents look almost pre-recession there. That hub is Hudson Square.

The Hudson Square submarket — which runs from Canal to 14th streets, and from Sixth Avenue to the Hudson River — saw the largest decline in vacancy rate and the biggest spike in asking rents of any neighborhood in Midtown South year-over-year, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s fourth-quarter numbers, unveiled at a media breakfast yesterday. [more]

Manhattan office leasing activity hit its highest level since 2000, with tenants signing new deals for more than 30 million square feet, executives at commercial firm Cushman & Wakefield said this morning at the company’s quarterly media briefing in Midtown.

Only four months ago, as the velocity of office leasing slowed in the third quarter, there were “warning signs,” that the market, while healthy, might weaken, said  Joseph Harbert, COO of Cushman’s New York metro region, during the third-quarter market briefing. But instead, it improved in the fourth quarter. [more]

From the January issue: The Manhattan office leasing market started 2011 with a bang of big leasing deals, driving down availability rates significantly. It’s not expected to perform quite as well in early 2012, but real estate professionals do view the year ahead in a positive light.

Bruce Mosler, chairman of global brokerage at Cushman & Wakefield, said he does not expect much in the way of blockbuster deals in the first part of this year. That continues a trend that started in the second half of 2011 in which relatively smaller deals — less than 100,000 square feet — took a greater share of the market. [more]