With deals ranging from law firm Proskauer Rose’s 406,000 square feet at SJP Properties’ new 11 Times Square to the New York Liquidation Bureau taking 116,540 square feet at Swig Equities’ 110 William St., the number of transactions over 100,000 square feet is also up sharply from ’09. Only eight of those 21 big deals were renewals, suggesting that tenants are more willing to get out into the market and explore their options, said Joseph Harbert, COO of the New York metro region, at C&W’s briefing.

Added to which, Harbert said, “Despite this long, deep recession, we never got as much sublet space as people anticipated.” Van Buren said at Thursday’s CBRE event that absorption has been “basically flat” YTD, while his colleague, EVP Peter Turchin, noted that sublease space in Midtown has declined by 22.3% this year. “After the market gave back 23 million square feet during the two-year downturn, it has stopped giving it back,” said Van Buren.

In fact, Turchin said, space is being withdrawn from the Midtown market at a rate we haven’t seen before. It’s already ahead of the 2005 total of 4.3 million square feet; YTD the tally is 4.4 million square feet.

However, Midtown finished ’05 with an availability rate of 8.9%. Today, across Manhattan, “availability has been stubbornly stuck at 14% for the past year,” said Van Buren. Helping maintain it at that rate was an increase in Downtown’s availability from 12.4% in May to 15% in June, due to Goldman Sachs’ vacant 1.1-million-square-foot berth at 85 Broad St. entering the totals.

Meanwhile, asking rents for the island overall increased in June, if only by three cents from May’s average of $47.58. Turchin noted that there’s been “tremendous price compression” among the top-tier Midtown buildings, where asking rents in ‘08 were 60% above the average. Today, that price delta has shrunken to 17%.

Over the course of Q2, Manhattan’s three submarkets saw vacancy declines of anywhere from 0.01% in the case of Downtown to 1.04% in Midtown, C&W reported. These three submarkets and the other CBDs tracked nationally by C&W saw a quarterly decline in vacancy for the first time since Q4 ’07, dipping an average 0.23% to 14.8%.

Sixteen of the 31 CBDs tracked by the firm saw quarterly vacancy declines during Q2. That compares to nine of 31 markets, or 29%, during Q1. The largest quarter-over-quarter declines occurred in Atlanta, which declined to 21.5% from 23.2%; Fort Lauderdale, which declined to 18.9% from 20.4%; Phoenix, which declined to 22% from 23.4%; Oakland, CA, which dipped to 16.5% from 17.7%; and Manhattan’s Midtown submarket, which declined to 11.5% from 12.6%.

“Markets throughout the US continue to strengthen, as it becomes strongly apparent that the national vacancy rate for CBDs has peaked,” says Maria Sicola, executive managing director and head of Americas research at C&W, in a release. “Increased leasing activity has attributed to declines in vacancy.”