Commercial Real Estate Market Research for Office Tenants: What to Read, What It Means

Commercial real estate market research, for an office tenant, is the reading you do before a search to learn what space like yours should cost and how much negotiating room exists. It is not about valuing a building. Six metrics carry most of it: availability, the three kinds of rent, sublease inventory, net absorption, leasing volume and building class. The information comes from three places, quarterly reports, published asking rents and a broker's own deal book, and each has limits. Asking rents are public. The effective rents on signed deals rarely are, and those are the ones a negotiation turns on.

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Updated 2026-10-03 · Nomad Group

What the research is for, when you are the tenant

An owner or a lender researches a market to decide what a building is worth. A tenant has a narrower job: pricing occupancy and leverage. That comes down to three questions. What does a floor of my size cost in the neighborhoods I would accept, once concessions are counted? How much choice is there at that size? And how much time do I have? Everything below serves one of those.

Six metrics, a sentence or two each

Availability and vacancy. Vacancy is space standing empty. Availability is everything being offered, including occupied floors that are coming free and subleases. A tenant picks from the second, so it is the better read of your choices.
Asking, taking and effective rent. Asking is the quoted price. Taking is the rent a lease is signed at. Effective rent goes one step further and averages the free months and the buildout allowance over the whole lease, and it is the only fair basis for comparing two offers.
Sublease inventory. Space offered by an existing tenant instead of a landlord, usually cheaper and for a shorter term. When it shrinks, so do the discount options.
Net absorption. Whether the occupied total grew or shrank over a period. Positive means more space was taken than returned.
Leasing volume. The square feet signed in a period, the plainest measure of demand.
Building class. The quality tier of a building, and the premium tenants pay for a better one. Class A, B and C explains the letters.

Three sources, and the limit of each

Quarterly market reports. They give the direction of the whole market and of each submarket. They are aggregated, they describe a quarter that has ended, and the largest deals dominate them.
Published asking rents. Listings and rent tables show what landlords quote. That is a starting price, not a signed one.
A broker's deal book. Signed leases at your size, with the concessions attached. This is where effective rents come from, and it is not public.

A tenant can read the first two alone. The third is the practical reason most tenants bring in a broker before making an offer.

Citywide readings against a single submarket

A borough average does not describe a neighborhood. In the Q2 2026 edition of our market report, Manhattan availability was 14.5% while SoHo was at 13.5% and Midtown South at 17.1%. A tenant looking in either one would misjudge its leverage from the Manhattan number. Always read the submarket line beside the headline.

Where the current figures are kept

Market figures date quickly, so we keep them on the report page and link to them here. Our own asking rents are handled the same way: they sit in the rent table and update with the listings.

The block below shows floors asking $75 to $100 a square foot a year, before electricity. That is the band around the Manhattan average asking rent printed in the report, so it shows what the headline number looks like as actual floors.

Floors asking $75 to $100 per square foot

Live from our listings · 6 of the 11, cheapest first

11 of the 46 floors with a published rent ask $75 to $100 per square foot per year, from 2,940 to 13,266 square feet.

Floors: 11
Sizes: 2,940-13,266 sq ft
Asking rent: $78-$98 / sq ft

Every available floor, with asking rents →

The full guide

This page is the short answer. The long one, with the numbers worked through, is here:

When should an office tenant begin researching the market?

Before the search, and well before a lease ends. A tenant with 12 to 18 months has time to read the market, tour alternatives and negotiate. The reading itself takes days; the lead time is what gives it value.

Why can't we look up what other tenants actually paid?

Because signed lease terms are private. Asking rents are advertised, but the free rent and allowance in a signed deal are known to the parties and their brokers. Reports approximate concessions and leave out the detail of each deal.

What is the difference between taking rent and effective rent?

Taking rent is the face rent written into a signed lease. Effective rent subtracts the value of the free months and the improvement allowance and averages the result over the term. A deal can have a high taking rent and a low effective rent.

Is a report's average asking rent what we should expect to pay?

No. An average covers every class of building in every submarket. Your rent depends on the neighborhood, the building and the floor, and then on what you negotiate around it. Use the average as a reference point and the floors as evidence.

Talk to a broker

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