How Investors Are Responding to the Slowdown in Office

Tim Lee is the VP of corporate development and legal affairs at Olive Hill Group.

Office leasing and investment activity slowed at the end of 2017, but the decline wasn’t enough to cause investors to worry. The Olive Hill Group’s Tim Lee says that the end of last year was slow, but not enough to cause major concern—especially considering market fundamentals. Now, there seems to be a turnaround. In January and February, deal volume and lease transactions have ticked up, and it is giving investors like Olive Hill Group a positive outlook on activity in 2018.

“Leasing activity was softer in the last half of the year, but I wouldn’t say that it was a significant drop or any kind of perfidious drop,” Lee, VP of Corporate Development and Legal Affairs at Olive Hill Group, tells GlobeSt.com. “We did see that at the beginning of the year there was a pick up again, and there have been a number of requests from tenants for 10,000 square feet or larger. On the sale side, activity didn’t pick up a the end of the year. Typically, at the end of the year, there is a huge flurry of deals that try to get in before the end of the year. That typically helps to drive deal volume up at the end of the year, but last year, we did not see that rush. Things took a breather, but it wasn’t a big drop.”