The report says that 16.1 million square feet of Midtown's 34 million square feet of office space has been repriced since last September, resulting in a 28% decline in asking rents compared to the peak a year ago. "Repricing [has] been going on for a while," Pamela Murphy, SVP with CBRE's New York tri-state market data services, tells GlobeSt.com. "We see it turning a corner now, because it takes a few months for a deal to close, and obviously the asking-versus-taking rent numbers are based on closed deals."

Accordingly, Murphy says, "it's a bit of a lagging indicator, because we're talking about deals that were negotiated during the repricing a few months ago. Now we're seeing the fruits of that and landlord and tenant expectations are starting to converge. We expect that to continue well into the year." If the cycle of pricing erosion and recovery resembles the letter U, "we're curving into the bottom of the U."

As of June 1, Midtown average asking rents were $65.13 per square foot for direct space and $56.83 for sublet space, according to CBRE's "Midtown Office Leasing: A Market in Transition" report. That average isn't weighted toward repricing at the low or high ends of the spectrum. "It truly is across the board," Murphy says "With top quality space, more proactive landlords tended to reprice first, whereas less proactive landlords would lag."