Report: Job growth helps sink vacancy rate

Steady job growth in the first nine months of 2005 helped reduce the Manhattan commercial vacancy rate, according to a report released Tuesday afternoon by Colliers ABR. New York’s private sector employment increased by 46,800 jobs through the end of September, the report said, creating more than twice the number of such jobs for all of 2004. The total number of private sector jobs, then, reached 3,042,6000, the highest since the 3,112,400 in September 2001. The overall commercial vacancy rate of 9.9 percent at the end of September was the lowest since August 2001, Colliers reported, when it was at 9.3 percent.