by Calculated Risk on 10/01/2007 03:56:00 PM

From Mathew Padilla at the O.C. Register: O.C. office rents, vacancies spike

A surge in office construction combined with sweeping layoffs at mortgage companies lead to both higher office vacancy and higher rents in O.C. in the third quarter ...

The county's office vacancy rate hit 10.53 percent at the end of last month, the highest in nearly three years ... its previous peak was 17.2 percent in March 2002, amid the last construction wave.

In all, developers have finished work on 3.5 million square feet of offices so far this year with another 1 million coming in Q4 ...
...
As for mortgage companies, they occupy about 4 million square feet of office space in the county, or roughly 4 percent of larger buildings. The total is down 30 percent from 6 million in mid 2005 ...

Orange County is home to many of the mortgage companies that have closed (like New Century). So the rising vacancy rate is no surprise. However I also expect to see rising vacancy rates nationwide, especially for office and retail space.