Robert Sammons of Cassidy Turley explains:
Fairfield County has the dubious honor of being the only market in the metro area to have an overall vacancy rate greater than 20 percent, closing the second quarter at 20.7 percent (the Class A subset was even less positive at 24.1 percent). It has been worse for this struggling market—in fact, just in the first quarter of this year, the overall vacancy rate was 20.9 percent.
The center of the difficulties has been Stamford, where there are currently six buildings that each have at least 100,000 square feet of contiguous space available. That number includes 695 East Main Street, with its entire 582,000 square feet vacant as it is being realigned from a single-tenant building (formerly occupied by General Reinsurance) to a multitenant one. Also included is the newly constructed 1 Harbor Point Square, with 167,000 feet that remains available.
Of course, there is an additional issue moving forward that has been mentioned time and time again: the potential partial or entire relocation of UBS out of Stamford and back to Manhattan. As devastating psychologically and financially as that would be for Fairfield County, an additional 600,000 square feet of availability would add “only” 100 basis points to the current 20.7 percent figure.
