Manhattan’s office market hit the highest leasing volume level in nearly two decades last year, showing companies' appetite for new Big Apple offices has not yet been satiated.

Thanks to several monster lease deals and healthy job growth, a total of nearly 43M SF of office leases were signed in Manhattan in 2019, according to figures from Colliers International.

That is the highest level since 2001 and almost 3% higher than 2018, itself a stellar leasing year. Leasing activity was 15% above the borough’s five-year historical average, Colliers found.

“This was certainly a year where we had many notable, large leases driving activity,” Colliers Senior Managing Director Franklin Wallach said. "It was an array of industries that really made it so interesting."

While most offices leases are for between 5K SF and 15K SF, a couple of megadeals in any given year have the power to move the needle, even in a market that is seeing significant amounts of new office product.

"Always, the question at the end of the day in the overall Manhattan market, is ‘is the demand keeping up with supply?' And we ended the year at that perfect equilibrium point of 10% [availability]," Wallach said. "You're neither in a landlord-favored market nor a tenant-favored market.”

The average asking rent hit just shy of $78.80 per SF at the end of the year, according to Colliers, which is the second-highest quarterly average on record, and rents increased in 13 of Manhattan’s 18 submarkets.

The rising asking rents were driven largely by the huge new buildings opening up: 2.2M SF of office spaces bigger than 100K SF asking for at least $100 per SF in rent opened in 2019, according to CBRE, driving the city's average asking rent up 10%. More than 21% of all office leasing in Manhattan in 2019 was of new product, according to Savills.