Despite significant and well-documented turmoil within the euro area, the German economy has continued to grow and demand for office space to rent in Berlin has increased in recent quarters. Figures from the advisory firm Cushman & Wakefield show that the first half of 2012 saw a record amount of office space around the city being newly occupied.
The total of 3.5 million sq ft of newly occupied office space was around 172,000 sq ft more than in 2011, but that number was higher than any equivalent previously recorded.
“The capital’s attraction stretches way beyond the city’s boundaries even in 2012,” said Lisa Ebert from C&W’s Berlin office.
“Over the past few months, we haven’t only been registering newly founded companies from Berlin; there have also been many companies moving here from around Germany and abroad.”
Ms Ebert and her colleagues emphasised that much of the office space being newly rented around the capital was taken by small businesses and start-ups. Indeed, their confidence in the prospects for Berlin as a business location is reckoned to be unwavering. The C&W report also noted that vacancy rates within Berlin offices fell in the second quarter of 2012 for the fifth three-month period in succession.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Germany, C&W announced that it had secured 135,000 sq ft of office space for an unnamed multimedia company at the Altezza office building in Munich. The site’s landlord is the German branch of the UK telecoms giant BT, whose headquarters are elsewhere in the same city.
Editor’s notes: Take-up through office space lettings in Berlin in 2022 was 773,000 square metres. In 2023, the take-up figure was 544,200 square metres — down 30% from the previous year and representing just over half of the record-breaking year 2019.