Building owners, John Aldrich, president of Colliers International's Dallas office, tells GlobeSt.com, "will do anything to get people to look at their space before they drop their rates." But, alas, the rates will be dropping because the sweet ride is over and it will take a year to 15 months before the market bounces back, he predicts.

Red flags might be going up the pole, but it's not going to be a repeat of the late 1980s and early 1990s even though the region is starting to hit numbers of the same proportion, he insists. Gen Ys are flinching, but veterans like Aldrich say they are positioned for a slowdown. "We are a lot more prepared for this than we were the last time," he says. "For people who've been around for more than 10 years, no one is surprised."

Aldrich isn't a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, but he is realistic. It hasn't been a great year, but it's not been all that bad. "We've been in a footrace for six, seven years. It's finally slowed down," he says. "It's a correction that everyone expected. It could be that we've forgotten what it's like to be in a normal market."

Aldrich says Richardson's Telecom Corridor took a heavy hit in the second quarter. He pegs it as the fastest-growing sublease submarket these days. The bottom line numbers remain elusive, but the layoffs and high-tech fallout are definitely taking a toll. "The fact that it's the fastest to go down will also mean that it's the fastest to go back up," he says of those better days that surely lie ahead for the nation and DFW.

Fact is, says Aldrich, job growth is still good despite layoffs from the big boys in the high-tech corridor. Also, the momentum of the high-flying days from last year pretty much carried the DFW region through July. But now it's August and the phones, he says, aren't ringing quite so much. Still, there are deals being cut, maybe not as many and maybe not as large. "It's fairly easy to lose perspective," contends Aldrich. "It's not as bad as it feels, but in relation to where it was, it's terrible.

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