Downtown Detroit Remains a Hot Market

DETROIT—Many observers thought that Detroit’s recent declaration of bankruptcy would spell doom for Motown. But the downtown office market keeps chugging along, attracting tenants from the suburban submarkets, posting impressive gains in occupancy rates and seeing positive absorption, according to a recent study on the second quarter by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.

“Most of the metro area submarkets posted minimal absorption figures with the exception of the Detroit CBD and Troy submarkets which respectively posted just over 52,000 and-120,000-square-feet of positive absorption during the quarter,” Newmark researchers found. And “the CBD’s vacancy rate fell 40 bps to 27.1% during the quarter.” In the first half of the year alone, the CBD has seen 194,064-square-feet of positive absorption.