US Office Market Ready for Growth Spurt

CHICAGO—Jones Lang LaSalle has just reported that the US national office market absorbed 13-million-square-feet of space during the fourth quarter, the most absorbed since 2007 and a 24.5% increase over the highest quarterly net absorption levels in the past six years. According to its 2013 National Office Market Report, the market also absorbed a total of about 40-million-square-feet of space during the year—a big increase over the 28.2 million-square-feet of gains in 2012.

Since the economic crash, “we’ve had growth, but it’s been a lot more uncertain,” says John Sikaitis, managing director of Local Markets and Office Research with JLL. But with this solid quarter and year, he thinks the market may have truly turned a corner. “We’re starting to see some growth and optimism coming out of Europe,” he points out, and confidence in the US economy has grown so much that the government shutdown in the fourth quarter seemed to have little impact. “I think that would have been a lot more debilitating 12 or 20 months ago,” he adds, but “the private sector wrote it off.”