A recent study looks at expectations for the Rochester commercial real estate market.
Overall, that market is pretty healthy. That’s how Alex Amorese sees it. He provides sales and other services at the Rochester office of CBRE, which is a worldwide commercial real estate and investment firm.
The company recently released its market outlook for Rochester for 2024.
Amorese said that since the pandemic, with more people working hybrid, it has increased the vacancy rate in the downtown area. But he said that some developers and employers are looking for creative ways to use downtown office space.
“For the most part office occupiers are going to be requiring less space, smaller footprints,” said Amorese. "But I think some of our developers, especially in the city, are well positioned for the other trends coming out of the post pandemic office world, most notably, we keep hearing this buzz term ‘flight to quality,’ but we really like to call it more of a flight to experience.”
Amorese said some of the current downtown workers are looking for things like more amenities and walkability to various attractions if they are going to be working downtown. For 2023 the overall vacancy rate for the office market in the Rochester metro area was 17.3%, which was down from the 2022 vacancy rate.
WXXI News reported last October that downtown vacancy rates were roughly double what they were before the pandemic.
Amorese added that the shortage of single-family homes in the area continues to drive more people, especially younger people, into renting apartments as opposed to buying a home.
“That continues to push demand,” said Amorese, “and then you add the student housing factor to it as well. Innovation Square is a great example of that as well, (The) Metropolitan, the Linc on Main Street, those are all predominantly occupied by local U of R, RIT, Nazareth students, international students, so that helps with the demand for that market as well.”
Amorese views the commercial real estate market in the Rochester area as generally healthy right now. He said that, “we’re experiencing a lot of the national trends, good and bad, that the commercial real estate market is experiencing.” And Amorese gives good marks to local developers, who he said are “pivoting as needed,” and continuing to bring “success stories to our market.”
This story includes reporting by WXXI's Brian Sharp.
