Today, he is extremely bullish, he tells GlobeSt.com.
''The market is awesome!'' Phenicie tells GlobeSt.com. ''Literally, we have done 16 deals this year.''
He says he has another four deals about to close. Granted, many of them are small, and nothing at all like two year ago when high-tech and telecommunication companies were taking huge blocks of space.
Of the four deals he and partner David Hart have in the works, for example, the largest is an 11,000-sf lease. Still, he estimates that the office vacancy rate, which was approaching 60% at the end of last year, has improved by 10 percentage points -- maybe more.
In fact, he tells GlobeSt.com that the market is improving twice as fast as he originally projected.
''It's interesting how ugly it became so fast, and now it is coming back a whole lot faster than I originally thought it would,'' he tells GlobeSt.com. ''We expected it to start to level off and show some improvement at the end of the second quarter, but instead we're seeing it in the first quarter. We expected a lot of tire kickers, but we're seeing a lot of real deals.''
He compares it to the stock market.
Tenants and buyers can now pick up deals at huge discounts from where the market was two years ago. And while no one knows for sure, it increasingly looks like the deals won't be around much longer.
''A lot of clients are calling me saying they think they need to make a deal in the second quarter, because they don't think these good deals will be around much longer,'' he adds.
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