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The Central Texas office market ended the third quarter of 2008 with a vacancy rate of approximately of 12.6 percent versus 11.6 percent at the end of the second quarter.
Nationally, office vacancy rates are running a little under 12 percent, meaning Austin is approximately 0.6 to 0.7 percent higher than the national average. Subleases are on the upswing.

Although the space at River Place Pointe was marketed as a sublease from eLoyalty Corp., brokers for Misys worked out a five-year lease directly with landlord FIC Realty Services Inc.

Mike Buls, commercial real estate broker, market researcher and principal of Austin's Buls Hodge Consulting, turned to his competitors this February in an effort to improve knowledge and awareness of the real estate market. Knowing 70 percent of available office space is sublease space, Buls began tracking that sector of the real estate market.

The owner of a 186,000-square-foot office building in the Arboretum area is looking for tenants to fill the space after Computer Sciences Corp. empties the project later this year.

Although 9500 Arboretum might be one of the few large contiguous office projects on the market, brokers say it constitutes only a fraction of a growing pool of properties vying for tenants in a softening market.

Austin companies seeking space are finding their glass half-full of available real estate, thanks to a recent surge in subleasing.

"It wasn't until January that things started opening up everywhere," says Matt Marino, controller at Waveset Technologies Inc., an Austin software startup that's hunting for space