NEW YORK CITY—Brokerage firm Avison Young reports that deals in the Midtown, Midtown South and Downtown markets helped push the overall Manhattan office vacancy rate to 9.4% at the end of the fourth quarter of 2014, the lowest the rate has been since 2012.
The brokerage firm in its report on the Manhattan office market for the fourth quarter of 2014 listed the Midtown overall market having a 9.8% vacancy rate at the end of the fourth quarter of 2014 down from 11% a year earlier. Midtown South's office vacancy rate stood at 6.8% at year-end 2014, compared to 9.0% the year before. The Downtown overall market's vacancy rate fell sharply from 15% at the end of 2013 to 10.5% at the end of the fourth quarter of 2014.
The report notes that there were 11 new leases in excess of 100,000 square feet in the Midtown South market in 2014, including the 194,000-square-foot deal with Buzzfeed at 225 Park Ave. South.
In terms of investment sales while the fourth quarter may not have been recording breaking, overall the year was bolstered by the strongest post-recession second quarter ($10.6 billion) and an above average third quarter ($9.0 billion), Avison Young reports. As such, the 2014 total sales volume was the third highest total ever recorded in the $36-billion range after the three previous years in the low $30-billion range. With 426 transactions above $10 million, there were considerably more transactions in 2014 than each of the preceding three years, which experienced similar sales volumes.
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