Thanks to the reduction in office rents following the real estate crash, the price of leasing a Manhattan office has not kept pace with inflation, according to a Jones Lang LaSalle report cited by the Wall Street Journal.
The average Manhattan office rent in 2012 is $55 per square-foot, up 22 percent from 2002, when the average rent was $45 per foot. However, had lease prices kept pace with inflation, they would be averaging approximately $60 per foot this year, according to JLL.
The Journal noted that the rate of rent increases far surpassed the rate of inflation between 2007 and 2009, but that now appears to be more of a blip than a benchmark to which rents should be expected to return.
“Rents are cheap. Now is the time to strike,” Tristan Ashby, head of research for the New York office of Jones Lang LaSalle, told the Journal. [WSJ] — Adam Fusfeld