Reston's Vibrant Economy Part 29: That Giant Sucking Sound

Here's one of the cheerier things you'll read about the awesome Reston-Herndon commercial real estate market:

Leasing of commercial office space in the Washington area had its biggest quarterly drop in more than a year as financial markets slid into crisis and economists predicted a deep national recession.

Along the Dulles Toll Road, where developers built buildings in hope of lining up tenants later, the vacancy rate for Reston and Herndon was 18.6 percent compared with 11.7 percent a year ago. Asking rents were flat at $31.14 per square foot compared with $31.16.

That's compared to a regional vacancy rate of 11.5 percent, which is no great shakes, either. But there are Signs of Hope! Time Warner leased nearly 200,000 square feet of office space at South Lake at Dulles Corner, which will probably be filled with friendly customer-service reps telling people that the serviceman will be there sometime between 9:30 a.m. and March, plus Strayer Education is moving to a new building in Herndon by 2010, which will be just in time for all of us to enroll for remedial classes in gun repair and taxidermy once we've lost the last few remaining jobs anywhere, the end.