Newmark JGT Exec: Industrial Is OK, Office Is Weaker

WOODBRIDGE, NJ-The 11 counties of Northern and Central New Jersey make up one of the largest real estate markets in the country -192 million sf of office space and 725 million sf of industrial space. And within that enormous block of landscape, “there has been a general slowdown, with substantially less velocity of leasing activity and an increase in vacancy, with about one-third of the space being sublet.”

The speaker is Stanley Simon, CEO of Newmark JGT of New Jersey, the firm that resulted from the merger earlier this year of Newmark & Co. and Jacobson, Goldfarb & Tanzman. “The market has been dichotomized into direct and sublet space,” Simon tells GlobeSt.com. “The majority of the sublet space is in Central New Jersey, which is home to a number of companies that have shed space to cut costs. For the most part, these companies are concentrated in the communication, financial and dot-com industries.”

In terms of numbers in the 11 counties tracked by Newmark JGT, the market had a negative absorption of almost 7.8 million sf at the end of the third quarter of last year. Overall asking offices rents had stabilized at $24 per sf gross, mostly because of the increase in sublet space in class A buildings. The overall available office space was just over 30.2 million sf, with 21.75 million being direct and the rest sublet.