According to new research from Cushman & Wakefield, large corporate relocations -- driven mainly by state incentives and steady yet modest employment gains -- propelled Northern and Central New Jersey into one of their best quarters of office leasing in recent history as vacant space tightened markedly in some market segments and particularly for Class A space.

"At 1.8 million square feet, the third quarter of 2016 boasted the highest amount of square footage absorbed in any one quarter in the Garden State in the past fifteen years," said Andrew Judd, Cushman & Wakefield's New Jersey Market Leader. "The last two quarters combined have produced slightly more than 2.8 million square feet (SF) of net occupancy gains, as vacancy has fallen by 140 basis points (BPS) since the first quarter. The demand for quality, Class A space throughout the market was evident during the third quarter, as all of the occupancy gains were concentrated within Class A product."

Via worldpropertyjournal.com >

The US office market continues to expand at a steady clip, and although no seismic shifts are expected, growth could finally begin to moderate next year as employers slow down hiring, according to JLL researchers. The Chicago-based firm just released its third quarter office statistics, and found that more than 47% of all leases that exceeded 20,000 square feet were expansions, findings quite similar to what has been seen for several years. Nearly 42% of the leases did not change in size, and just 11% involved downsizing.

Via globest.com >

BlackRock has set its sights on Hudson Yards for a new headquarters as big as 1 million square feet.

The company currently rents around 700,000 square feet in two buildings – Fisher Brothers and Soho China’s 55 East 52nd Street and Rudin Management’s 40 East 52nd Street. The lease at 55 East 52nd is due to expire in 2023. In February, The Real Deal reported BlackRock had tapped a JLL team led by Peter Riguardi to find a new, larger office space.

Via therealdeal.com >

Manhattan office leasing slowed by 23 percent over the past two months compared with the same period a year earlier, and is down 39 percent from 2014, an analysis of CoStar Group data revealed.

Tenants inked 476 deals covering 3.4 million square feet between July 1 and August 24 in Manhattan, down from 5 million square feet during that same period last year and 6.2 million square feet in July and August of 2014.

Leasing has slowed overall, but some said smaller tenants are tightening the purse strings more than others. “We are seeing a lot more reticence to [make] decisions on new space for smaller companies,” Douglas Linde, president of office landlord Boston Properties, said during a second-quarter earnings call in late July.

Via therealdeal.com >

Scott Rechler keeps the September 1990 issue of Time magazine in his office to remind himself “how bad things can be.” The cover story of that issue, “The rotting of the Big Apple,” highlighted how dismal a place New York City was back then — in contrast to now.

“New York’s doing great,” the CEO of RXR Realty said during his keynote address at the Marcum Real Estate Forum at 730 Third Avenue Thursday night. “But as I said, there are breaking points where it could go the other way – we’ve been that way before.”

Via therealdeal.com >

High-tech was nurtured in Silicon Valley, but even as the sector’s soaring growth has moderated somewhat, it has also started to sink roots in new cities and regions, perhaps providing these areas with the resilience to withstand economic downturns. That was one of the conclusions of a research team from Chicago-based JLL, which just released its latest Tech Office Outlook report, a study of the top 45 metro areas.

Via globest.com >

When a new businesses forms one of the first things it needs is space. That means, with all other things being equal, there is an important connection between the rise of startups and a market’s leasing activity. But of course all things do not remain equal, and we wanted to see if there was indeed a connection between entrepreneurship and leasing activity.

Startups are on the rise

Startup activity rose in 2016, continuing the climb in 2015 according to this year’s Kauffman Index. And that growth was much needed—just two years ago startup activity was at its lowest point in the last twenty years. Today it’s close to the peak achieved before the Great Recession.

The driving force behind much of this growth is the rise in opportunity entrepreneurship and an uptick in the rate of new women entrepreneurs. Some of the key areas hosting this growth include the usual suspects: California, Colorado, and Texas, joined by lesser known havens in Florida and Nevada. The five metro areas with the highest startup activity in the US are Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.

Yet despite much of the positive news concerning startups and their growth over the last two years, long-term trends are more concerning—from 2006 to 2013 startup density in the nation’s largest 40 metro areas decreased by 24%, revealing startup activity remains below historical norms.

Read the blog post on blog.gethightower.com >

The New York metropolitan area’s office-using job growth slowed dramatically over the past 12 months, adding to concerns over a potential supply glut in the office market.

A new report by brokerage Savills Studley  found that while job growth overall was strong, most new jobs were added in sectors that don’t primarily use offices, such as healthcare, retail or education. The growth in office-using jobs, meanwhile, was the slowest since 2010, when New York’s economy was still reeling from the 2008 financial crash (see chart). Between July 2015 and July 2016, only 19,000 (1.4 percent growth) such jobs were added, compared to 49,000 and 46,000 in the two prior years (when growth averaged more than 3 percent).

Read the article on therealdeal.com >