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Houston's office market is off to a rough start according to CBRE's Q1 data. Despite positive momentum in the local economy, Houston posted 418K SF of vacated space citywide, pushing vacancy to 17.8%, its highest point in 20 years. Class-B office space suffered the lion's share of move-outs, with Houston's Class-A market losing just 100K SF.
Downtown was the largest source of negative absorption in the office market with losses exceeding 285K SF of move-outs by way of expiring full-floor subleases and further occupier consolidation.
While vacancy returning via expiring sublease and consolidations continues to weigh on occupancy levels in both urban and suburban submarkets, total sublease space declined modestly for the third straight quarter, settling around 9.3M SF.
