The New York-based commercial property firm Reis reports that nationwide office space take-up kept pace with the scale of supply coming on stream for the first time since late 2007, shortly before demand took a major dip.
Responding to their own figures, Reis’ experts have suggested that improvement in the state of America’s office space markets reflects a more positive economic outlook, but made clear that growth in both areas remains “inconsistent”.
Office space vacancy rates in New York reportedly fell slightly in the fourth quarter to 11.4 per cent, while Washington D.C. maintained the lowest levels of empty office space in the US, with 9.9 per cent of its stock currently going unused.
There was a slight rise in terms of the rents being charged by office space landlords across the country for the first quarter since the third three-month period of 2008, after which time conditions again became markedly more challenging.
Reis economist, Ryan Severino, told Bloomberg: “These are only the nascent stages of a recovery in the office market.” Before noting that “vacancy has finally appeared to have stabilized”.
There have been a number of large-scale office space acquisitions carried out in major American cities in the past few weeks, with Google paying close to $2 billion to buy a 15-storey building in Manhattan and Boston Properties spending $930 million on the John Hancock Tower in Boston.
Meanwhile, the state of Massachusetts is gearing up for a massive building project that will establish roughly one million square feet of new office space in the city of Quincy, after local planners gave the relevant project the go-ahead.
Editor’s notes: In the first quarter of 2023, the US nationwide vacancy rate was 16.4 per cent. The figure for unleased office space in New York was 16.1 per cent, equivalent to 76 million square feet.
Washington D.C’s office space vacancy rate in Quarter 1 2023 was 19.2 per cent, reflecting an increase of just over 3 per cent in three years.
Boston’s vacancy rate in the same period was 15.1 per cent, increasing by nearly 10 per cent in three years.
Research conducted in June 2026 found that the US nationwide office vacancy rate was 18.6 per cent in Q1 2026, and that construction completions of 1.3 million square feet was the lowest quarterly total on record.
NYC overall office vacancy stood at 14.6 per cent in Q1. In Washington, D.C., the vacancy rate stood at 22.6 per cent, and in Boston, the overall vacancy rate had risen to roughly 25 per cent, up from below 5 per cent in 2019.