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For many commercial real estate brokers and landlords, the office space market on the Gulf Coast has turned to train wreck status — grisly, but hard not to stare.
Lee County, for example, would need to add 9,540 office and industrial jobs for those segments of the market to stabilize, given the current vacancy rate. That's according to a new study from LandQwest Commercial in Fort Myers. LandQwest Office Division Director Adam Palmer called the figures discovered in the report “staggering.”
The LandQwest study, says Palmer, looked at the last 10 years of square footper employee data in Lee County to reach its findings. It compared that data with the available space. With job creation at a snail's pace, the study clearly resonates in the broker community. Indeed, a room of 100 or so fellow brokers gasped when Palmer mentioned the report during a recent Certified Commercial Investment Member event.
The office real estate market picture is no less grim in the Sarasota-Bradenton region.
In that market, Lakewood Ranch Commercial Realty broker Anthony Homer says large office space leases have virtually evaporated. Homer says at least two-thirds of the office leases in the market the last few years are for space that's less than 3,000 square feet.
That translates to lots of small local businesses, which is good, but no national or regional businesses, which isn't so good, especially when it comes to more jobs. “Even though deal volume is up,” Homer says, “it's not really helping with absorption.”
Homer tells Coffee Talk he's heard rumblings of some big businesses that seek big offices, but no deals so far. “I can probably count on one hand the number of leases we've had over 6,000 square feet in the last two years,” Homer says. “Before that we regularly had companies that were taking space like that.”
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