Midtown Manhattan Is Poised to Burst With Available Office Space

(Bloomberg) -- Available office space in midtown Manhattan in the fourth quarter remained far below the post-recession high, but that may not last long.

As buildings go up and tenants move to newer digs outside of core Midtown -- the flashy Hudson Yards site on the far west side, for example, or the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan -- available space could surge to 14.4 percent of the market by 2021, depending on employment, Savills Studley forecasts. That would be the highest rate since the global financial crisis.

The data suggest landlords may be in a tough spot even as leasing picks up, fueled by a revival in demand from New York’s anchor industry, financial services. The figure in Midtown stood at 10.7 percent in the fourth quarter, the brokerage said, already almost a full percentage point above the post-recession low of 9.8 percent in 2015.

To contact the reporter on this story: David M. Levitt in New York at dlevitt@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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