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INDEPENDENCE, MO—The results are in...on the Q4 Xceligent advisory board survey, and the GlobeSt.com Thought Leader reports that steady, quite literally, is the word of the day.

“We ask brokers what single word best describes market conditions,” explains national analytics director James Cook. “We started doing the survey in Q3 of 2013. At that time, the most common words were steady and slow. Now the most common description is steady and active.” He adds that if he were to apply grades to those responses, the national office market activity went “from a C- to C+.”

Joking aside, it is interesting to note that the next six months, as mapped by Cook in the accompanying chart, show relatively little change. “I've been around long enough to see how slowly things change in a market cycle,” he responds. “Every five years or so conditions make a change, not necessarily quarter to quarter.”

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(Click here to track the latest results with that of Xceligent's last quarterly survey.)

The expectation of at least half of the brokers taking the survey is that “rents will trend up in the next six months, while 42.6% expect them to remain steady.” That bifurcation is a reflection, he adds, of local market specifics: “Someone in Little Rock will expect rates to be steady, while in Houston they'll expect them to trend up.”

Likewise for vacancies, and just more than half, 51.8% to be exact, expect vacancies to trend downward. In terms of new construction, expect it only if there's an anchor tenant to justify the project, according to 40.4% of the respondents. But just over 35% report seeing spec in their local markets. Sales activity has been on a solid upward trajectory over the past three quarters, Cook reports, and currently 42.6% of the Xceligent advisors taking the survey expect it to continue to heat up.

Cook addresses the thought that, as the market continues to grow in activity, now is the time for caution, before we get too far ahead of ourselves. It was a notion floated in the most recent Emerging Trends report, and something to consider again in the face of rising optimism. This is, after all, is an industry with a short-term memory.

“I do think there is a lot of optimism in the market,” he replies. “But I also think the office markets are moving at a good pace and that they have been pretty cautious. You haven't seen a lot of speculative construction or overvalued transactions.

“It's interesting,” he continues. “I was asked last week how could the survey be a leading indicator if your source is such an optimistic bunch. And, in fact, as the market waxes and wanes, brokers have to maintain that point of view in order to survive. But the short answer is that so far, as the market continues to show incremental occupancy gains, our surveys have been very accurate leading indicators.”