St Louis Lending Community Notices Office Vacancies On the Rise

St Louis Mortgage Refinancing and Real Estate News –

St Louis Finance News: Commercial Office Vacancies Continue To Rise
News Hotline: 877-334-0210 | Floyd Tapia

Commercial office vacancy rates are currently at their highest levels in 16 years according to a report by Reis real estate research firm with the St. Louis lending community seeing this first hand.

And the rising of unemployment rates across the country continue to decrease the demand for this retail space.

There is approximately 4 billion square feet of total office space available nationwide.

However, 700 million square feet, or about 17.2 percent is unoccupied as of March 2010. The last time office vacancies were this high was in 1994.

The number of empty offices has soared since the beginning of 2008, as unemployment and the ever growing amount of business failures have devastated commercial real estate.

This epidemic has hit the commercial sector hard on a national level. Almost three-quarters of the country’s major metropolitan areas has experienced an increase in office vacancies since the start of this year.

And to date, the city with the highest office vacancy rate is Detroit. The sad news is that this city has also been the victim of some of the highest amounts of foreclosures in the housing industry.

The financial downfall of the automotive industry has also played a pivotal role in the economic downturn of this area so much so that over a quarter of all office space in the metropolitan region now sits empty.

But the commercial market has been quite different on the eastern coast with Washington, D.C. boasting the lowest vacancy rate with only 10.4 percent of all office space vacant as of the end of March.

Overall, office rent continued to decline falling to 0.8 percent in the first quarter.

California’s Orange County and New York City saw the biggest decline in rents so far this year falling a considerable 2.3 percent and 2.1 percent.

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When applying for a St Louis mortgage or to discuss your St Louis lending options, call the recognized St Louis home loan experts, at 877-334-0210 or 314-334-0210 and ask for Steve Swan, Doug Stahlschmidt or syndicated columnist Floyd Tapia, the host of the St. Louis Refinancing “Mortgage Minute.”