Goade: The major players – like Facebook, Google and Amazon and all the names that you would expect – all seem to want a presence in New York, and many of them have their second largest presence in New York or Boston. Compared to the financial industry, it is still a small part of the New York market, but it is an ever going part of it. That’s because they are tapping out the resources for employment. The employee market is just being tapped out in the greater Silicon Valley. They are going to places young people want to be and where young people want to work, and that includes Manhattan and Greater Boston.

GlobeSt.com: At the same time, are there concerns about a tech or ‘dot com’ bust?

Goade: I think the market is strong enough to support it. What happened 10 years ago was a flurry of start-ups. The internet was a new industry, everyone tried to get into the space and everyone had a business plan that they were going to start with 10 people and end up with 300 people in 12 months. What happened was they got financing and they took space for 300 people. A lot of them never had more than 10 people. The bust that happened is when we finally realized that all of these companies weren’t going to get to 300 people in a year, and once it burst, it burst completely. The difference now is the bigger employees are real companies and they employ thousands of people, and they are actually occupying space and taking space. There’s a difference: these are real people sitting in real seats doing real business. It’s not a bust that I would see coming.

GlobeSt.com: What industry sectors are seeing the most growth in NYC? Education? Healthcare?

Goade: I don’t think education is a significant growth factor, though healthcare probably is. Financial services is what has always driven New York, and even with some of the layoffs that you’re alluding to, there’s always more hedge funds that want to start-up and take expensive space. There are more people feel that they need to have a presence in New York, and everyone feels like they need to have a regional office in New York. So I don’t worry about New York having a downward bubble.

GlobeSt.com: What workplace trends are you seeing this year?

Goade: The biggest trend we are seeing is the final implementation of the flexible workspace. We are seeing ever-smaller cubes, ever-smaller square feet per person. Real estate is expensive, especially in New York, and we are seeing people to begin to treat it as a luxury where people have big offices. We are seeing less big offices, smaller cubes and more flexible workspaces. By that, this generation is quite capable and quite willing to work from home. We see that as a benefit as opposed to a negative. We are seeing some places use technology to provide shared workspaces where you come in, you plug into a computer and that’s your office for the day. One, the technology is there to do that and two, the willingness of the workforce to have flexible space as opposed to the private office with the pictures of the wife and the kids, that is a change. Even in the law firm industry where they used to have 300 and 400 square foot offices for partners, we are seeing them go to the one-size fits all offices. When we move a law firm, typically, it is to smaller space. There’s less personal space and more collaborative space.

GlobeSt.com: How has that impacted rent growth?

Goade: It’s helped keep rents from escalating as fast as it otherwise would have because for the same number of people, there is less square footage taken. The vacancies have stayed a little higher than they would have otherwise. With that said, nationally we’ve got the smallest amount of construction delivery in 20 years. That lack of new space, not only in New York, but everywhere in the country, stopped building because of the recession and the lack of financing. While on one hand we have a lessening of demand of space per person, on the other hand, we have very little new space being delivered. Those two are offsetting each other.