CALABASAS, CA—Midtown Manhattan may have it beat in terms of total square footage and Houston may lead the way for new construction—about 11.5 million square feet are scheduled to come on line in the Oil City this year—but America's top office market has tech going for it. For that matter, so do the first and second runners-up.

That's one of the conclusions to be drawn from Marcus & Millichap's latest National Office Property Index, topped by San Francisco as it was in 2014. In second and third place are San Jose and Seattle, with New York City coming in fourth after ranking third the year prior. Rounding out the top 10 are Orange County (up three places to number five), Denver (also up three places), Miami (up four places), San Diego (down one slot), Nashville (up six places) and Portland, OR (down four places from last year).

“With few exceptions, the top-ranked markets include barriers to entry, low vacancy and above-average benefit from office-using employment growth,” according to MMI's report under the signature of Alan Pontius, SVP and national director of MMI's office and industrial group. “These markets reflect an expanding spectrum of economic activity, including technology, trade, healthcare, professional and business services, and hospitality.”

MMI's NOPI ranks 46 major office markets across the US based upon a series of 12-month, forward-looking economic and supply and demand variables. The firm ranks these markets based on their cumulative weighted-average scores for various indicators. Among these are forecast employment growth, vacancy, construction, housing affordability and rents. The NOPI is designed to indicate relative supply and demand conditions at the market level.

Although the index is intended to help guide investors, MMI provides some caveats in terms of following its rankings too literally. “The NOPI is not designed to predict the performance of individual investments,” the company says. “A carefully chosen property in a bottom-ranked market could easily outperform a poor choice in a top-ranked market.”

In addition, the NOPI represents “a snapshot of a one-year time horizon. A market facing difficulties in the near term may provide excellent long-term prospects, and vice versa.” Moreover, a market's ranking may fall from one year to the next, even if its fundamentals are improving.

“The NOPI is an ordinal index, and differences in rankings should be carefully interpreted,” according to MMI. “A top-ranked market is not necessarily twice as good as the second-ranked market, nor is it 10 times better than the 10th-ranked market.”

Furthermore, different investors have different criteria, and specialty indices within MMI's 2015 National Office Report provide further guidance. For example, although Las Vegas comes in at the lower end of MMI's overall index, the city tops the firm's high-yield and opportunity indices for this year.

And while office has lagged the overall recovery in commercial real estate, MMI predicts that vacancies nationally will finally descend below the 15% threshold this year, lifting rent growth to 4.1%. Rent growth is forecast across all 46 markets, only four of which are expected to show flat vacancy or a modest increase. Nationally, MMI says, “Forecast demand for 104.1 million square feet will outstrip 56 million square feet of new supply slated to deliver this year.”