The city's mega-office landlords are panicking, pivoting, and shedding what's worthless.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, Manhattan's office-vacancy rate is around 22 percent, the highest recorded since market tracking began in 1984. When you include sublet space, more than 128 buildings in Manhattan currently list more than 200,000 square feet of space as available for lease, according to data from the firm CoStar. The available space in these buildings alone amounts to more than 52 million square feet: the equivalent of more than 40 skyscrapers the size of the Chrysler Building. Many large property owners are now performing triage, trying to determine which buildings are still worth anything like what they paid for them.

Last year, a team of academics from Columbia University and NYU published a paper with the eye-catching title 'Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.' In it, they estimated that New York office buildings had lost 39 percent of their long-term value. A couple of months ago, they revised their projections based on newer data and came up with an even steeper decline ' 44 percent on the average path.

Brookfield paid Jared Kushner's family to take control of the debt-burdened skyscraper ' formerly known as 666 Fifth ' in 2018 and repositioned it with the reported backing of sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East. Its former aluminum façade was replaced with sleek glass. 660 Fifth recently signed an anchor tenant, a financial firm that allows remote work for 'any reason or no reason at all.' Around two-thirds of its space remains available, and leasing lately appears slow. Not a single new deal has been reported so far this year, according to CompStak. Brookfield executive Ben Brown, who oversees the company's U.S. office portfolio, assures me that the company is 'trading papers' with many prospective tenants. 'A lot of stuff is not at a point where we've disclosed it,' he says. 'One of our next leases will take us to 50 percent.'

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Interesting long article on Manhattan office real estate.