Manhattan Commercial Real Estate, in a few words.

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That’s the question I had in my head this morning, and quite honestly not an easy one to answer. But, as I look more and more into flexible office space solutions, I did a little bit of research.

The last New York City Office Market Mid year 2010 Co-Star report shows the following snapshot:

* Total office buildings in the city: 3,708
* Total Rentable Building Area (RBA): 526,439,040 square feet or more than 526 millions square feet!
* Current Vacancy of 8.1%, with a total of 42,455,971 square feet available for rent.
* From the 42 million square feet, 36,056,026 are available directly.
* The size of the subleasing market is considered to be 6,399,945 square feet, or roughly 6 million square feet.

The sublease market could be defined as space leased by a primary lease holder (primary tenant, flexible office company or operator, etc.) and then sub-leased on flexible terms to a sub-lease tenant at different conditions than the initial lease.

The flexible office spaces or “Executive Suites” as labeled by some only represent a portion of the subleasing market in NYC.
Due to their nature, the fact that they are leased for very short periods of time makes it difficult to size their specific market.
Nonetheless here are some numbers from a recent Co-Star search, criteria being for Manhattan only, for any size and any term:

* 103 buildings had “Executive Suites” available.
* 209 different spaces where available inside these 103 buildings.

This type of office space offering will become more and more available in the future.

As a sign, many of the flexible office space operators are expending, in the middle of a recession. Recently Micro Office Solutions doubled its space at 1375 Broadway.

Landlords need more flexibility to adapt to changing times and markets.

Peter Videv is a Commercial Real Estate Advisor at Sperry Van Ness in Manhattan