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Slow Recovery for City Market

BOSTON-The city's office market continues to experience declining rents and relatively high vacancies, according to Spaulding & Slye Colliers recently released fourth quarter market report.

By Naomi Grossman | Updated on December 30, 2003

BOSTON-The recession is supposed to be nearing its end, but someone forgot to tell the office market here which continues to experience declining rents and relatively high vacancies, according to Spaulding & Slye Colliers fourth quarter market report.

The report indicates that the availability rate in Boston is at 17.4%, down slightly from 18.4% in the second quarter of 2003. William P. Barrack, principal at Spaulding & Slye Colliers, tells GlobeSt.com that those numbers will most likely not go down much more over the next year. In fact Barrack anticipates that availability rates will probably remain where they are through 2004. Until companies start adding jobs, he notes, those rates are not going to experience real change.

Barrack points out that large financial institutions can’t be relied upon to pull the market out of its doldrums, as they did a number of years ago. Those firms are no longer growing–it is the smaller to medium sized companies that are going to drive the recovery. Five of the largest leases done in the last year put space on the market, including PriceWaterhouseCoopers which took 332,000 sf at 125 High St., coming out of over 400,000 sf and Thomson Financial which renewed its lease in Fort Point Channel, but downsized by 100,000 sf.

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