The research firm IndustrialPort has published regional vacancy rates for office real estate for the first time. The survey highlights a pronounced concentration of available space in established centres. In prime locations rated with the top OfficeScore AAA, the office vacancy rate currently stands at 8.75 percent. This surpasses the level of leading locations for warehouse, logistics and production real estate, where vacancy is at 7.5 percent.
The top office markets surveyed include Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart. Across these seven locations, current supply totals around 8.5 million square metres of office space. A structural imbalance becomes apparent when examining stock distribution: although these metropolitan areas account for only 24 percent of total recorded German office stock, they concentrate 52 percent of the nationwide supply.
Regional Divergence and Nationwide Average
Outside the seven leading office cities, available supply is noticeably lower. In the remaining regions, the vacancy rate stands at just 2.5 percent. Weighted by area across all 400 rural and urban districts in Germany, this results in a calculated average of 4.0 percent. The median across all 400 district values is 0.5 percent, meaning that in exactly half of the regions the rate is below this figure. In 323 districts, representing well over four out of five submarkets, vacancy even remains below the two percent mark.
Comparison of Prime Locations for Office and Industrial Space
For the comparative analysis, IndustrialPort juxtaposed the highest-rated location tiers for both asset classes. As the groups cover different regions, this is not a comparison of identical locations. Outside the respective AAA locations, the picture is reversed: there, warehouse and industrial space registers a vacancy rate of 4.0 percent, whereas office space shows a rate of 2.5 percent. In both segments, it remains uncertain to what extent these vacant spaces can be re-let on economically viable terms in the future.
Peter Salostowitz, Managing Director of IndustrialPort, explained that prime location quality does not necessarily coincide with space shortages. Leading conurbations in particular can display both buoyant demand and substantial supply simultaneously due to their size and market activity. In his view, metrics such as vacancy, rental rates, yields and location quality should therefore always be assessed as mutually independent market indicators.
