The tide is turning in the commercial office market, as a battered financial sector is expected to shift the balance of power away from New York landlords by forcing open millions of square feet in unused office space.
As Wall Street firms announce tens of thousands of job cuts, landlords are scrambling to retain their existing tenants, and the eventual flood of office space threatens to drop prices into a downward spiral. Brokers say the widening and increasingly unpredictable gap between asking rents (what landlords seek from tenants) and taking rents (which is what tenants are willing to pay) underscores the difficulties of a market in decline.
Rents are expected to fall for at least the next 12 months. Colliers ABR notes that during the last two market downturns in New York, average asking rents fell 30.8 percent between December 1987 and June 1993 and 23.4 percent between September 2000 and August 2003.
Jeff Ackemann, managing director of Jamestown, an Atlanta-based real estate investment firm, says the negotiation gap is a reflection of how much the market has changed since the economic crisis hit.
“It’s not so much the delta between the asking rent and the take,” said Ackemann, whose company manages several office towers in Manhattan, including 1250 Broadway, One Times Square and Chelsea Market. “The real delta is what I could have gotten three months ago and what I will take today.”
He said landlords in some Midtown submarkets will happily lease space to a tenant for $70 a square foot where they would have commanded $100 a square foot prior to the stock market dive in September.
Based on current market conditions, Colliers ABR is estimating a 25 percent drop in average asking rents to $50.20 by mid-2010, compared with $67.06 during the record peak month of May 2008. That means the balance of bargaining power has clearly shifted to tenants.
“If a landlord was to force a tenant to make a decision on a 10-year renewal, they’d have to take a very aggressive stance,” said Howard Dolch, executive vice president of Lansco. “The tenants that are willing to have discussions are acting in a painfully slow manner. People are still looking for a bottom.”
Kevin Comer, senior managing director at Beck Street Capital, said it’s difficult to make a blanket statement about rent spreads around the city, but said on average the gap has widened from between 5 and 8 percent to between 10 and 15 percent.
“I think you’re going to see incredible disparity across different neighborhoods,” said Comer, whose firm owns about 10 commercial and residential buildings in Manhattan.
Greg Wang, a broker at GVA Williams, said the only tenants making decisions on new space are facing expiring leases. He said landlords are desperate to renew existing leases and will offer significant concessions to hold on to a quality tenant.
“If you have 12 to 18 months remaining on a lease, now is a good time to renegotiate,” said Wang. “Either you can cut off your existing lease and write a new lease today, or do a ‘blend and extend.'”
Ackemann said that concession packages have doubled to between 12 and 14 months of free rent and $65 to $80 a square foot for a work letter.
At the peak of the real estate boom, asking rents at Chelsea Market were going for $75 to $80 a square foot, and now average $65 to $70 for the best spaces. The 1 million-square-foot building at 75 Ninth Avenue is almost completely leased, except for an 18,000-square-foot second-floor space and a 58,500-square-foot sublease from research firm GFK North America, which is consolidating space.
SL Green, one of the city’s top landlords, is aggressively working to extend existing leases and lock up new tenants, in order to prevent being exposed by lease expirations over the next two years.
“I think it’s important to understand that with regards to the asking rent in the first place, we’ve always been very conservative as to the asking rents that we publish,” said Greg Hughes, chief financial officer at SL Green, on a conference call. “Consequently, where we have seen reduction in the net effective taking rents, the need to address or reduce our asking rent isn’t as great where you might otherwise think.”
In October, News Corp. affiliate News America signed a 12-year lease with SL Green for 54,000 square feet at 1185 Avenue of the Americas, expanding its total occupancy to 138,000 square feet. The expanded lease locked up the 22nd and 23rd floors, which were originally scheduled to expire in 2009.
Eisner, an accounting firm, agreed to an eight-year lease for 34,000 square feet at SL Green’s 750 Third Avenue, as the 13th-floor lease was set to expire in 2009 and asking rents ranged from $58 to $68 per square foot. The firm will now occupy 107,000 square feet at Grand Central Square.
In November, Viacom extended its lease at its 1515 Broadway headquarters, renewing 1.1 million square feet that was scheduled to expire in 2010 and taking an additional 170,000 square feet that was scheduled to expire in 2012 and 2013.
Overall, SL Green officials said average rent was $66 a square foot during the quarter and during its third-quarter conference call with analysts, said that the spread between asking rents and taking rents was about 5 to 10 percent and that concessions were getting more aggressive.
The disparities will depend largely on which submarkets are dominated by large financial institutions. For example, AIG has about 2 million square feet concentrated in three large office buildings in the Financial District. If the insurance firm decides to shed large amounts of space, that could open up 30 to 40 percent declines in Class B and Class C office space.
At the same time, Comer believes that the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers could lead to steep price cuts in the Plaza District, where both firms held large blocks of office space.
“After the year ends, we’re going to see some pretty large blocks of space come on the market,” said Comer.
David Falk, executive vice president at Newmark Knight Frank, cautions that discounted rent is the not the only quality that tenants look for in a building. He notes that Chelsea Market has become a hub for some of the top emerging media companies in the country, including Google and Oxygen Media.
“Even if the rents were the same as in Midtown, they don’t want to be in a buttoned-down environment,” said Falk, whose firm is the exclusive leasing agent for Chelsea Market. “The profile of the tenant here is definitely a younger, more urban employee. It’s typically not someone commuting from Fairfield County.”
Comer said that as a landlord, he is willing to work a little extra to retain existing quality tenants, rather than trying to search for a new leaseholder. He added that he is not interested in locking up long-term leases due to the market’s instability. He much prefers locking up three-year deals, and renegotiating leases when the market hopefully picks up in strength by 2011.
He also worries that brokers may exacerbate the downward deceleration of the market.
“On the tenant side — just like the investor side — the perception is that things are going to get a lot worse than they are now,” said Comer. “What really concerns me the most is the brokerage community leading the market down as precipitously as they led the market up. We all have to be careful not to feed into hysteria.”