Although there has been an achingly slow, but steady recovery in the real estate market, experts remain bearish on new commercial developments, and for good reason. The demand just isn’t there yet.
One reason: Businesses are cramming more people per square foot into the buildings they lease than they did in previous decades in order to decrease overhead costs.
Burbank’s current office vacancy rate is 12.1%. This is not a number that should necessarily cause alarm, as the national office vacancy rate this year is somewhere between 15% and 17%, according to various reports issued by real estate groups. Nonetheless, economists like to see a vacancy rate that’s closer to 8%, leaving Burbank a distance to go to achieve that goal.