Dallas' New Mantra: It's a Tenant's Market

DALLAS-In a midyear report that’s hot off the presses, the Dallas office market has reached 28 million sf of vacancies, or 18% of the more than 155 million sf. Of that, 6-1/2 million sf are coming as sublease space and peaking at its highest level in a decade, says Cushman & Wakefield of Texas Inc.’s senior director Calvin Hull.

Hall says he isn’t a Doomsday prognosticator. “There are still a lot of opportunities out there,” he emphasizes to GlobeSt.com. “The first six months of 2001 have been extremely slow compared to the frenzy that the Dallas office market experienced over the past several years,” he says in the report. And on the positive side, leasing activity had picked up for the first two months of the second quarter, helping to offset the negative 522,000 sf that had come to market in Q1. But, it was a brief respite as the leasing market heads back into a slump, he says. He is optimistic that the temporary upswing will save the Dallas region from another negative absorption all-time high.

Admittedly, Hull’s calculations include that 14 million sf of class C space that will always impact the overall numbers for the Dallas region. Still, he’s saying what brokers across the region know–leasing activity is down, but the area’s market remains stronger than many of its sister metropolises. At year-end 2000, the sublease number had been 2.6 million sf in comparison to today’s tally. And, says Hull, it’s going to continue upward.