From left: Greg Taubin, executive managing director at tenant-side brokerage Studley, Bruce Mosler, chairman of global brokerage at Cushman & Wakefield, David Falk, president of the tri-state region for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, Eric Ashman, CFO for Thrillist Media Group and Jacqueline Weiss, a partner with the real estate group of law firm Arent Fox

Technology and creative firms which have been driving the Manhattan office leasing market this year are inking deals that are shorter and that utilize space more efficiently than the typical financial firm deal, brokers speaking on a panel this morning said. The companies are negotiating deals that are shorter than the industry standard of 10 years, and the firms average about 120 square feet to 130 square feet per person versus the industry standard of 200 square feet to 250 square feet per person, the panelists said. [more]

From left: Forest City Ratner’s 1 Pierrepont Plaza, 2 Metro Tech and 6 Metro Tech

From the April issue: The Manhattan office leasing market is thriving compared to most major cities in the country, but just a short subway ride away in Brooklyn, the market conditions are vastly different. The office market in Downtown Brooklyn was once going strong with a full slate of long-term leases, and a roster of financial firms like Bear Stearns & Company, which were locating back offices there to flee expensive Manhattan rents. [more]

From left: Denham Wolf principal Paul Wolf, the TKTS booth in Times Square and the Starrett-Lehigh building

Non-profits, art groups and even some media companies are being forced out of the Midtown South neighborhood they’ve long called home thanks to the area’s exploding office leasing market, according to the Wall Street Journal. [more]

Having already ceded some of its demand to recent upstart office markets like Midtown South and downtown Manhattan, Midtown East is the subject of a Department of City Planning review intending to probe whether it needs to incentivize commercial property upgrades in the area, Crain’s reported.

Midtown East has more than 70 million square feet of office space, 13 Fortune 500 companies and about 250,000 jobs. [more]

With the exception of employers in New York City, Miami and other so-called “gateway cities,” U.S. office tenants can expect 2012 market conditions to remain very similar to those at the end of 2011, according to a report released today by tenant representation firm Cresa.

Tenants will continue to benefit from a relatively weak office market in most cities. [more]

Credit: PwC (click to enlarge)Real estate investors believe the office market is a smart investment play, as they project high tenant retention and rent growth in 2012, according to a fourth-quarter survey of investors released today by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Investors like the capitalization rates offered by office properties, as they remain “favorably priced” in many markets, according to Mitch Roschelle, a partner of PwC’s U.S. real estate advisory practice. “The bullishness on the part of investors in the office sector comes as more office tenants are staying put and prospects for rent growth are improving,” he said. – Adam Fusfeld
[more]

Asking rents for Manhattan office space remain muted even as tenants have
inked deals for more space over the past six months than any time in more than
a decade.
For all types of Manhattan office buildings, average asking rents were up only
2 percent in the second quarter of 2011 compared with the same period a year
ago, or $1.21 per square foot to $55.52 per square foot, figures released by
Cushman & Wakefield today at its quarterly media briefing in Midtown, show. [more]

From left: Empire State Building, 30 Rockefeller Center and 120 Park Avenue

New York City office rentals got more expensive in the first quarter of 2011, even as vacancy and absorption rates remained mostly unchanged, according to separate reports released today by Cassidy Turley and Colliers International. Li & Fung’s rental in the Empire State Building, Lazard and Deloitte signing for space in 30 Rockefeller Center and Bloomberg LP’s move to 120 Park Avenue steered the strong market. The average asking rent in Manhattan rose to $50.18 per square foot from $48.62 per square foot, highlighted by a $2.14-per-square-foot jump in Midtown North, according to Colliers. The firm reported an availability rate of 11.7 percent, down 0.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010, and just 300,000 square feet of net absorption. TRD [more]

Rupert Murdoch and 1211 Sixth Ave.

From the April issue: The 44-story tower at 1211 Sixth Avenue, home to Rupert Murdoch’s global media company News Corporation, is getting a major new tenant. Axis Re, a division of Axis Capital, the large Bermuda-based reinsurance company, signed a lease to move to 121,019 square feet on floors 24 through 26, data from CoStar Group shows. The asking rent for the three floors at the 1.8 million-square-foot tower, which is located between 47th and 48th streets, was $65 per square foot, leasing data website MrOfficeSpace.com shows. That price was a bit above the overall asking rent in Midtown, which in February was $57.97 per square foot, CBRE figures show. Click here to see the commercial market report in the April issue for more on the latest office trends.

Click the chart for more

From the March issue: Quirkily named Internet startups were dominant in last month’s Super Bowl advertising. Initial public offerings for these companies have recently been splashed throughout the business pages, and Wall Street analysts are valuing some of them in the range of tens of billions of dollars.

Then, of course, there’s the gorilla in the room, Google’s recent $1.9 billion purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue.

These days it seems you can’t escape that eerily familiar sense that we are back in the throes of another tech bubble. And a recent spate of commercial leasing deals in Manhattan involving technology firms — ranging from titans like Facebook and LinkedIn to upstarts like BuddyMedia, Foursquare and Tumblr — suggests that they are on something of a real estate tear. [more]