A comparison of downtown and suburban office markets

There have been many studies about office demand with relation to employment focused at the MSA level. This paper investigates the relationship between office demand and office employment between downtown and suburban markets. The paper provides an analysis of office demand and employment across 43 downtown markets and 52 suburban markets for the years 1998 and 2006. Correlation and multi-variable regression analysis are used to determine the relationship between office demand, employment, and rent as well as the relationship between downtown and suburban markets. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on levels of office employment against levels of office demand in each market for each year separately. The second section investigates the change in office demand against the change in employment and rents for each market over the two years. Finally, the third part analyzes the relationship of office demand, employment and rent between downtown and suburban markets. The paper uses employment data categorized by industry using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Employee counts are estimated from the establishment data available by zip code from the U.S. Census Bureau. By using employment data at the zip code level, the study is able to split the MSA into downtown and suburban markets. The study focuses on six industries thought to use the majority of office space.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Real Estate

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Patel, Nikhil, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William Wheaton.

• Urban Studies and Planning.
• Center for Real Estate.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58649

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/58649