Office Market

Metropolitan Baltimore's office market is responding to slowe demand by cutting back on construction and by moving away from speculative building toward build-to-suit projects in areas where any major amount of development is happening, real estate professionals say.The slower market means there is no immediate solution for downtown Baltimore's glut of older, or so-called Class B, office space. In addition, there still doesn't appear to be room for all of the shiny new Class A office towers that have been proposed during the past year.

A midyear international office market survey conducted by The Office Network shows that the greater Washington area office market continues to grow but at a much slower pace than it has in the recent past.Ranked sixth in the nation in net absorption, the region recorded an increase in occupied office space of 1.5 million square feet for the first half of this year.In the survey, which presents midyear figures from 49 markets -- 36 in the United States, two in Canada and 11 in Western Europe -- the national average for uncommitted space in existing office buildings dropped slightly to 19.3 percent, down from 19.5 percent at the end of last year.

David Gillece, president of the Baltimore Economic Development Corp., looks out over the Baltimore skyline and wishes he had more large chunks of office space with which to entice major corporate tenants.A tour of Baltimore's premier office locations encompasses just a few buildings and takes only a couple of hours, he says. "Our goal is to have a healthy amount of inventory for lease," he says.But for James Joseph Casey, president of Casey & Associates, there is at least one too many buildings on the market.