"The spread between asking rents and taking rents will start to narrow in the next few months," said John Powers, chairman of the New York tri-state region for CB Richard Ellis, at the company's quarterly media briefing on Wednesday. In the meantime, though, the availability rate will continue to increase, although Powers predicted it won't hit the 1992 nationwide peak of 18.7%.

Currently, the overall vacancy rate for Manhattan is 8.5% as measured by CBRE, and reaching 9.6% if the space that will become available in the next months is taken into account, as Cushman & Wakefield does in its first-quarter report. Class A vacancy has reached 10.8% from 10.2% in February, according to the monthly snapshot released Tuesday by Colliers ABR. Midtown's vacancy rate at 10.5% is noticeably higher than the 8.1% rates seen in both Midtown South and Downtown, according to C&W. "You could almost say this is a Midtown recession," said C&W COO Joseph Harbert during the company's media briefing on Tuesday.

Some of that increasing availability will result from what Powers called "a lot of shoes dropping" Downtown in the coming months, including the space that Goldman Sachs will give up when it moves into its new headquarters at year's end and the fallout from AIG's travails. And some will come from blocks of sublease space as major employers continue to downsize.