A Tighter Commercial Office Market
There is a recent trend, where the velocity of office leasing has slowed down a little. This is evidenced by special offers from many executive suites who are sitting with the same offices available they had last month - where it seems the number of people "kicking the tires" has been reduced.
I don't think the number of interested parties has actually gotten slower. I think the opportunity set has grown larger and that is what is diluting the audience that is ready willing and able to rent new offices - the constant number of prospects is being divided by a large number of suites than we've ever seen before, so it thins out the traffic.
At Looking For Space, we've seen a recent uptick in the rental of multi office suites, particularly in Manhattan. In fact, our inventory of listings with 3 or more offices has been reduced greatly because we've rented most of them - and in fact we are very eager to obtain new listings right now, so we can continue on the path of renting the "suite within a suite" in a law firm or other professional business.
We've had recent success at 61 Broadway, New York, NY 10013, where we rented an 8-office and 4-workstation group of offices to a small law firm that was relocating downtown.
At 535 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017, we rented 5 offices and 2 workstations to 3 different tenants. Here the demand was parsed between more than one tenant, but the effect was the same - all 5 offices that were available have been leased to attorneys who were looking for space online and found exactly what they were looking for on www.LookingForSpace.com.
That is not to say we haven't experienced the same issues everyone else operating in this vertical online market has been experiencing lately. The space is crowded. Popular Adwords on Google have been bid up to unprecedented cost levels by the competition between executive suites, online listing services and online brokers - and there is nothing any of us can do about it. I've seen some words on Google pay per click advertising that a year ago were perhaps between $2.00 and $2.75 per click currently bid up to the $20.00 - $25.00 level, and there are very few companies that are willing, or that have the capacity, to pay for that kind of advertising. And, those are the few that are showing up as ads on the first and second pages of Google results, with everyone else pushed farther back.
The other side of this phenomenon points to fewer clicks on all the other websites that have been pushed farther back in the search results - so people searching for shared professional office space online have to dig a little deeper that before, to get to the content they are really looking for.
If you have extra offices and you'd like to rent them to attorneys or other professionals looking for space online, we are a proven resource for law firms to reach attorneys seeking shared legal office space. We've been doing this with success for the past 5 years and we're engaged in a national expansion, to about 10 new major cities. Please consider leasing your extra offices and legal spaces with the help of our service - that is effective and inexpensive to use. Call us at: 212.986.9100 and we'll be happy to tell you more about how our professionals can help you rent extra offices in your space to other attorneys and small law firms.