Manhattan's three office markets each told a different story when it came to the absorption of space during October. In Midtown, according to CBRE, there was 470,000 square feet of negative absorption during the month. That brings the YTD absorption tally to negative 7.35 million square feet, compared to 5.31 million square feet between January and October of last year.

CBRE says Midtown South saw negative absorption of 330,000 square feet, bringing its YTD tally to 3.24 million square feet—nearly four times the 850,000 square feet of negative absorption in the market as of Oct. 31, '08. As a result, Midtown South's availability rate of 15.3% exceeded Midtown's, which ended the month at 15.1%, for the first time in a year. Downtown, the 20,000 square feet of positive absorption was nearly flat from September, and the availability rate of 11.8% was also unchanged from the previous month, says CBRE.

Across Manhattan, the average asking rent for class A product dropped 1.2% from $63.90 per square foot in September to $63.12 per square foot last month, according to Colliers. Robert Sammons, director of research at Colliers, writes that while asking rents have almost consistently been pushed lower each month since May '08, the rate of decline has been easing since May of this year. From May onward, class A rents have fallen an average of 0.8% each month as opposed to an average drop of 2.4% each month for the 12 months prior to that, Sammons notes.

On a market-by-market basis, the rate of dropoff for class A rent is more varied, according to JLL figures. Pricing in Midtown and Midtown South was off "sharply" in October, declining $4.36 per square foot to $65.69 in the former and $6.68 per square foot to $43.74. In keeping with the shallower decline in Downtown's class A rents since the peak, the month-to-month falloff was smaller: $1 per square foot to $41 at the end of October.