New Office Vacancy Low

awood91

awood91

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Boston?s Office Vacancy Lowest in Four Years
By Beverly Ford


Boston
BOSTON-The overall vacancy rate for office space in the Boston area has hit a four-year low at 8.2%, signaling a broad based and continuing recovery across most business sectors, analysts say.
Brendan Carroll, with Richards Barry Joyce and Partners? Boston office, tells GlobeSt.com that class A office space is so tight in some of Greater Boston?s key ?nerve centers,? such as the Back Bay, Financial District, East Cambridge and Waltham, that vacancy levels are below 10%.

In the Financial District, which hasn?t seen occupancy levels this high since 2003, vacancy rates for class A office space hit 9.6% in the third quarter, a drop of 5% in the last five quarters alone. For larger users, contiguous class A space over 100,000 sf is so scarce that there are only three Financial District buildings to chose from, Carroll notes.

Driving occupancy levels has been a steady growth in legal, financial services and professional service tenants, Matthew Dwyer, an analyst in Jones Lang LaSalle?s Boston office tells GlobeSt.com. ?We?re seeing a continued recovery through most business sectors,? says Dwyer, adding that the recovery ?is showing no signs of abating.?
In East Cambridge, the numbers are even more striking. A surging biotech industry gobbled up more than 14% of the neighborhood?s vacant office space in the last three years, pushing vacancy rates from a high of 27.7% to 13.3%. Growth in this sector has been so strong that East Cambridge ranks second only to Waltham for occupancy growth in all of Greater Boston.

Demand for lab space in East Cambridge is even more pronounced. In the last three years alone, the neighborhood?s laboratory vacancy rate dipped from 32.9% to 6.3%. ?That has definitely been one of the most dramatic aspects of this recovery,? Carroll says of the sharp drop in lab vacancies.
 
What's the status of 33 Arch Street? Has this vacancy low enabled it to finally be filled up?
 
Bring on the SST, Winthrop Square, and Russia Wharf!
 
tysmith95 said:
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/r...-the-strongest-office-markets.html?yptr=yahoo

It's currently at 12 percent, not at the 8% back when the original sst was proposed.
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TySmith -- Something is inconsistent between your statistics and the one quoted above -- nothing changes from 12 to 9% with a base of 100 million square feet in 3 months

So its either duling statistics that are using different criteria for the base, occupied and unoccupied spaces, or your source is not as up to date as the date of the article or the ???
 
i wonder why they can't lease all the space in the insanely beautiful tower formerly known as JHT.
 
whighlander said:
TySmith -- Something is inconsistent between your statistics and the one quoted above -- nothing changes from 12 to 9% with a base of 100 million square feet in 3 months

So its either duling statistics that are using different criteria for the base, occupied and unoccupied spaces, or your source is not as up to date as the date of the article or the ???
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The original article is 10 years old, bro...

But anyway, there are a whole slew of different firms (including the one that I am currently employed by) that produce market- and submarket-level measures of rent and vacancy. This sort of data is what I deal with every day at work. The big brokerages (JLL, CBRE, C&W, etc.) all put out numbers, the research shops (Reis, CBRE EA, etc.) all put out numbers, firms like CoStar put out numbers, and the list goes on. And each of these firms uses different methodologies and different samples from different sources of data. Even within one large firm (such as CBRE or CoStar) different divisions and business units will produce different statistics. There's really no use in debating the details here.

What each firm agrees on is that Boston Office vacancy is low when compared to other markets, and vacancy is low today when compared to its own history.

EDIT: Can we move this thread out of "Development Projects"?
 
Good point. I shouldn't have compared the vacancy rate from different sources. It would be interesting to find the historical vacancy rates from just one source. Hopefully this strong office market means the Congress Street garage office tower will be built.

This is probably a design a better Boston or Boston urbanism thread.
 
odurandina said:
i wonder why they can't lease all the space in the insanely beautiful tower formerly known as JHT.
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Odurandina -- Because my dear "Anachron" -- the land lord has the distinctly ancient impression that companies care about "the View from the Top" and consequently tries to charge rents accordingly

Why is GE choosing to renovate a couple of old candy factory buildings and add a relatively modest 12 story structure when it could have had its choice of old or new towers?
 
i searched for a good home for this; figured i'll just post it here, and call it good.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/...okI/story.html
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From the Article...

Can hosting a conference convince millennials that Boston is the place to be?

It’s an unconventional approach for an unconventional problem. Boston, one of the most youthful cities anywhere thanks to its colleges and universities, can’t seem to hold onto its young after they graduate.
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No.

Massachusetts politicians and executives don't get it. SF succeeds by selling an identity and a vision (true or not). MA has several things that form its identity.

  1. Non-compete Agreements.
  2. Conservative Business Culture.
  3. Traditional culture that doesn't really try to push artistic boundaries or accept the idea that being different is a good thing.
  4. Less access to VC funds. More VC density means more competition to invest in startups and more ideas being examined.
  5. Miserable late-fall, winter and early spring weather.

Then you have less tangible stuff like Boston is considered "The No Fun City" by many Millennials because of its strict liquor/restaurant licensing.

Also probably less stated is that Boston just isn't seen as interesting after many of these students spend four o more years here for school. Early twenties folks often want to just go somewhere different for no other reason than they can since there is little to no baggage.
 
i believe you posted something similar to that in the Globe. Well done. We've lost too many bars in the past few years. Need a special mayor's commission to fix this problem as soon as possible. liquor for at least 30 more minutes. i also hope they don't discover Austin. What about filling in Kenmore Square incl wayy more neon, and LCDs?
 
^

Boston Globe said:
Boston, one of the most youthful cities anywhere thanks to its colleges and universities, can’t seem to hold onto its young after they graduate.
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Is there any actual truth to this? Who cares how things "seem" to Shirley Leung? Boston may not be "the place to be" but it absolutely is a "place to be" for Millennials. We're not San Francisco, but neither is any other city in the world. San Francisco is so unique and such an outlier that it really can't be compared to.

Judging by this column, you'd think we were some middling Midwestern city that can't hold anyone under 40 or some seriously unhip Southwestern suburb. Boston (and Cambridge and Somerville and etc.) do a very good job of appealing to young people, especially the highly-educated young people that are so crucial to the modern economy. To deny that because Mark Zuckerberg left is to miss the forest for the trees.
 
Yeah, I have to agree - Boston does keep a lot of its graduates (and a lot more so than before), but, we simply have so many and are such a small city that of course we are going to lose a percentage to NYC, LA, SF, etc. As for Boston being not fun/stodgy - I think that has be slowly/steadily changing in since the early 2000s. Bars closing - well, we have the same (if not a little later in my experience) last call as SF. Obviously we can't change the weather, but (peak summer is also terrible w/ heat and high humidity), but, I think the rest of it is OK. Or, at least, it is changing for the better - some people actually like a little more of a conservative office/business environment anyways. SF at least seems crazy to me - knowing quite a few people there, most would instantly pass on a candidate to hire if they showed up in any type of dress shirt/pants, or heaven forbid a suite (at least in tech).

BTW, odurandina - they tried this with the Theater District awhile ago, but, please, we don't need a mini Times Square. Kenmore Square has suffered enough since the 90s.
 
These articles about "the Young are Leaving" always punt on any real analysis, to the point of sheer silliness. Zuckerberg, for chrissakes.

Compared to other places, Boston metro area has long had a disproportionate number of universities relative to local population. A good chunk of our economy is dependent upon attracting students in from other places. If, over the last century, every single out-of-state student had stayed here after graduation, and if every in-state student had done likewise (or returned from their out of state school), I think our population would be above Shanghai's. Boston metro's growth patterns have long been influenced by "capturing" some percentage of out of state students, but it's never been 100% or anything close to it. As an adult, I've lived in three other states and one other country and have always been bumping into locals in each place who went to Boston for school and then went home. So, while our economy has long been dependent upon bringing people in for university, and has long benefited by having some portion stay, that self-same economy has never been dependent upon keeping them all here afterwards.

So, where's the data analysis of whether this is trending in any particular direction, for either out-of-state students or our home-gown adults?

Instead we get "haunted by Zuckerberg's departure" level tripe.
 
And it's also not just about "keeping graduates". Plenty of my friends and acquaintances came to Boston after undergrad or grad school in other cities, drawn here by our culture and urban environment and hospitals and industry. There is much more to this story than what percentage of Harvard/MIT/Tufts/BC/BU/NEU/etc grads stay in the Commonwealth.
 
West said:
Instead we get "haunted by Zuckerberg's departure" level tripe.
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Also, he himself already said if he was to do it over again he would have stayed in Boston:

"If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me."

https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/f...-a-company-now-i-would-have-stayed-in-boston/
 
JumboBuc said:
And it's also not just about "keeping graduates". Plenty of my friends and acquaintances came to Boston after undergrad or grad school in other cities, drawn here by our culture and urban environment and hospitals and industry. There is much more to this story than what percentage of Harvard/MIT/Tufts/BC/BU/NEU/etc grads stay in the Commonwealth.
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Yup. I arrived at the age of 40, after all grad school was done. I was following my wife's career, as an academic she was not going to get scads of offers, so we were ecstatic one was in Boston. At least five of the fourteen co-workers in my department came here after their college years were done. There's a newcomer who might be a sixth, though I think I hear a touch of Revere when she talks.
 
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