The city’s Economic Development Corp. and the Empire State Development Corp. are calling for developers to turn a Harlem parking garage into an office building and cultural center, the Wall Street Journal reported. The request for proposals, slated to be issued today, will seek a developer to build 300,000 square feet of space. [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]

Nationwide, office space is filling up in downtown areas, while its counterpart in the suburbs remains vacant. “It’s a reversal of what we’ve been seeing in decades,” the Wall Street Journal’s Anton Troianovski says in the video above.
In the 1990s, the vacancy level was higher downtown than in the suburbs, but now downtown is leading the recovery in the office space market. “The downtown office market has stabilized, while the suburbs have lost about 280 football fields worth of space,” Troianovski said, which may be attributed to companies expanding and looking for more space.
[more]

Office tenants in Midtown leased more space in November than in any month since the middle of 2006 as new office leasing rang in at double the monthly average, a new report covering all firms’ deals released today by commercial firm CB Richard Ellis shows.

“The month’s robust leasing activity — the largest single-month total since June 2006 — was achieved by deals of all sizes across the entire market,” the Midtown report says.

Tenants struck relocation or expansion deals for more than 2.4 million square feet in Midtown, compared with 1.2 million square feet the month before. TRD [more]

While the global commercial real estate market remains tenuous, with Manhattan and Miami still struggling, Newmark Knight Frank’s 2010 Global real estate markets annual review shows that progress is being made, with several office markets around the globe having shown improvement by the end of 2009. Both the Manhattan and Miami office markets hobbled through the end of the year, according to the report, with Class A office space vacancy rates of 8.1 percent and 20.8 percent, respectively, by the end of the fourth quarter. [more]

Downtown Brooklyn office real estate is suffering, according to Crain’s, with just three deals inked last year for 30,000 square feet of space or more. With lowered Manhattan rents putting up a fight and tenants looking to streamline their space, the Downtown Brooklyn market is hurting — and it’s tough to tell when it might rebound, according to Chris Havens, CEO of Creative Real Estate Group in Brooklyn. “The market is a mixed picture, with a vacancy rate that is lower than almost any major office market in America, but it’s a very slow-moving market,” Havens said.

555 Fifth Avenue and Tadd Wisinski, a senior vice president with UGL Equis (building photo source: PropertyShark)

The New York office for the broadcast communications division of the
multi-billion dollar Harris Corp. is moving uptown from its Midtown
South location to Atco Properties’s 555 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of
46th Street, according to a release by the tenant broker on the deal,
UGL Equis.

The broadcast division is taking 17,460 square feet in the 19-story
building with a move-in date of April 1, a spokesperson for UGL Equis
said. The firm currently occupies 15,000 square feet in 99 Madison
Avenue at 29th Street.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Asking rents in the
238,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, which is 18 percent
available, range from $49 per square foot to $54 per square foot,
according to leasing data Web site, MrOfficeSpace.com. [more]

Once considered a viable alternative to pricey Manhattan office space, the New Jersey waterfront is now losing its luster in the eyes of fiscally-minded businesses, according to Crain’s, making 2009 the most dismal the region has seen in two years. The disparity in lease rates between New Jersey waterfront office space, in cities like Weehawken, Hoboken, and Jersey City, and Manhattan is slowly narrowing, leading to a slowdown in activity. After massive asking rent cuts in Lower Manhattan, the rent gap between there and New Jersey dwindled to just $6 per square foot, according to Cushman & Wakefield. As a result, the first nine months of 2009 saw 710,000 square feet of space hit the market with no takers.

The long-expected return of unneeded office space to the Downtown market by large financial firms may push vacancy rates up by two-thirds, a Cushman & Wakefield expert in the market said today.

Andrew Peretz, executive director at commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield, predicted the vacancy rate, now at 9.6 percent Downtown, could reach 15.75 percent, a jump of 64 percent.

That increase in the vacancy rate would drive down prices, he said.

“I do think there will be a decrease in asking rents over the next two or three quarters,” Peretz said. He was speaking this morning at the firm’s fourth-quarter market briefing at the company’s Midtown headquarters.

For Manhattan overall, the situation was not as bleak, although prices may not rise for more than a year and a half, Cushman & Wakefield COO Joseph Harbert said at the same event. [more]

While New York City may be known for its pricey office space, that
paradigm could change soon. Washington, D.C. is inching closer to the
Big Apple in terms of price per square foot. The two cities have long-competed for the dubious title of most expensive city for office space, the Wall Street Journal reported, but rarely have the two been so closely neck-in-neck. While New York office
space’s price per square foot declined almost 20 percent
year-over-year, according to fourth-quarter data released by research
firm Reis, average rents in Washington dropped just 3 percent. In the
fourth quarter, New York City’s average office space rents hovered
around $45 per square foot in the fourth quarter, according to Reis,
while Washington rents were approximately $42 per square foot. The
disparity in office performance is based in large part on the two
cities’ divergent industries, according to Robert Bach, a chief
economist for Grubb & Ellis. “The financial crisis hit New York hard,
which is why it’s down so much, whereas the government is one of the
few sectors that has actually added jobs,” Bach said. This could lead
to an even tighter race between the two cities, price-wise, according
to Reis’ report. The firm estimates that Washington will actually
exceed the Big Apple in its average rent per square foot by about $.20
by the end of 2010.