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We monitor around 1.27 million square metres of Wellington CBD office space. Our new survey reveals that while vacancy has remained stable in the first 6 months of 2011, rising only marginally from 9.9% to 10.0%, an increasing proportion of vacant space is concentrated in C grade properties. 15.9% of C grade properties in the CBD are vacant. While this is only slightly up from the 14.3% recorded in December 2010, it represents over 92,000 square metres of vacant space out of a total vacancy of around 129,000 square metres. A grade vacancy is very low, only 2.7%.

The total space occupied by government including Wellington City Council has declined a little from 49.3% to 48.4%, but is still over 620,000 square metres. Government occupies over 85% of the Thorndon precinct and 47% of the CBD core precinct. In Auckland, our research suggests that 7.8% of CBD offices are occupied by central and local government. The influence of government helps explain why Wellington with a much smaller population than Auckland has a similar amount of CBD office stock, 1.27 million square metres as against Auckland’s 1.37 million. Unlike Wellington, Auckland has a substantial metropolitan office stock spread throughout the suburbs, which adds another 1.6 million square metres.

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