NEW YORK CITY-Following a flurry of significant deals in the spring and early summer, Lower Manhattan has become the leading submarket in the city year-to-date, CB Richard Ellis officials conceded at a press briefing at 7 World Trade Center Monday morning. At the halfway point of 2011, CBRE observed that large New York institutions and beginning to take large, long-term leases once again, driven by an appetite for new construction and state-of-the-art services.

“There have been some tremendously large transactions occur in the first half of this year, but the fact of the matter is, by all measures that we can observe, we are in for a very strong velocity here in 2011,” said Matthew Van Buren, executive managing director of CBRE’s New York office, sharing the firm’s second quarter MarketView data. “It may actually approach its highest levels or even exceed them for the last 10 years.”

In Manhattan overall, leasing activity has totaled 15.68 million square feet year-to-date, compared to 11.68 million square feet in Q2 2010. And in Downtown alone, approximately 3.23 million square feet has been leased year-to-date, compared to 1.43 million square feet in Q2 2010. This 1.8-million-square-foot jump, according to CBRE, has been defined by major relocations and desire for post-2000 office space. For example, Conde Nast Publications’ one-million-square-foot lease at One World Trade Center drove the highest single month of leasing activity here since September 2006.