A possible exception to the change in the market's direction is in downtown Los Angeles, where Cresa Partners broker Kathy Porter and John Eichler, director of client services for Cushman & Wakefield, both say the market is trending toward equilibrium between tenants and landlords after strongly favoring tenants for many years.
"Downtown L.A. certainly isn't a landlords' market," Eichler said, "but it is less of a tenants' market today than it was on the first of this year."
Despite the softening of the Southern California office markets, Miller of Cresa Partners said, many landlords are holding the line on rents because they believe demand for office space will grow before long. Miller, however, thinks rents will fall further before they climb again.
Either way, Los Angeles landlords are in better shape than those in many parts of the country, especially those in downtown San Francisco's South of Market district, where the bottom fell out when scores of dot-com tenants went under.
"Landlords there could cut their rates in half," Miller said, "and still not get any deals done."
