But Mller managing director Peter Rösler said: "Following the exceptional rises in the boom year of 2000 and the good results of last year, this strong decline was only to be expected."
The Munich office market--previously one of the tightest in Europe--was the hardest hit, with a 60% drop in take-up, reflecting its dependence on the IT and electronics sectors. And Germany's financial capital Frankfurt saw a 41% fall.
However smaller markets with a broad business base fared better: Cologne bucked the trend with a 50% surge in take-up to over one million sf and the capital Berlin saw a slight increase with 2 million sf taken up in the six months.
In line with the declining take-up, there has been a surge in total vacancies space with just under 50 million sf available in the major cities, up 43% in a year. Accordingly, top rents eased in the first half of this year.
But Rösler remains optimistic. "Against this background, we expect the space turnover for 2002 as a whole to be between 25 and 30 percent down on last year's figure", forecasts Rösler. "With demand recovering slowly and the supply side reacting by halting the realisation of a large number of projects for the time being, we do not anticipate any crisis in the office property markets of the kind experienced in the mid-90s," he said. "In the medium term, the markets will normalise, with somewhat higher vacancy rates than in the recent past and slightly lower take-up than in the boom years. By international standards, though, the German office markets are still extremely stable and healthy."
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