NEW YORK CITY-Cushman & Wakefield reported a very strong year, with intriguing Manhattan office leasing activity and low vacancy rates – two of the many factors prompting Joe Harbert, chief operating officer of C&W New York Metro Region, to state, if a touch carefully, “If we continue at the pace from the last half of the last year into 2012, we’re going to have a good year.”

According to Harbert, 2011 was an “extremely strong leasing year” and saw 51 office deals over 100,000 square feet. He explains that 29 of these were new deals and 22 were renewals. This activity pushed the year-over-year leasing rate to just over 16% from 2010. A “strong component of the local economy,” financial service companies, were responsible for 29.7% percent of these new deals, while media and information leased 25.3%, prompting Harbert to describe the sector as “on fire” last year.

Activity was hot in New York, but it wasn’t burning for the duration of 2011. Ken McCarthy, senior economist and senior managing director at C&W, explains that the second half of the year presented slightly weaker growth than the first, indicating the pace had slowed. However, he observes that, nationally, “things seemed to be improving,” in the industry across all 12 months. For instance, going into 2012, he notes that there are concerns about the state of Europe and how this will affect the US economy. He notes the “underlying dynamics of the US labor market were pretty healthy,” last year with the lowest level of new unemployment claims since 2008 at the year’s close, setting a solid foundation for 2012. Positively, 1.6 million jobs were added last year, which was double the rate in 2010, and leasing activity was up 15% nationally, the prime markets being Chicago, Orange County and downtown Manhattan, creating favorable, if not quite outstanding, conditions as the industry moves forward.