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What is the total market size (number of buildings and total square feet) for class-a commercial office buildings, one million square feet or greater in the top 50 US metro areas?
Hi there, and thank you for your request for the number, and total square feet for class A, one-million-and-larger-square-feet commercial buildings in the US. Below you will find information from the US Energy Information Agency and Forbes.
The short answer is that there are 5,600 commercial buildings larger than 500,000 square feet in the US, which combined amount to 7.047 billion square feet.
Almost half of these are located in the South of the US, whereas the Northeast is the region with the lowest concentration of commercial buildings.
I elaborate on my findings below.
METHODOLOGY & NOTES
In order to answer your query, I located a study by the US Energy Information Agency on the number of commercial buildings in the US which includes most of the information required. Despite having been published in 2015, the data included in this study dates back to 2012 - the EIA publishes a disclosure on why the figures took three years to be made public, which is mainly due to the way the data is collected and reported.
It should be noted that the EIA defines commercial buildings are as buildings larger than 1,000 square feet, of which more than half is devoted to commercial activity - not residential, manufacturing, industrial or agricultural. This means that many of the buildings included in the CBECS are much smaller than the buildings you are looking for - in fact, 73% of them are smaller than 10,000 square feet in size.
The study does break up the number into building size - but goes up to 500,000 square feet and larger, which make up a very small chunk of the total number of buildings. I detail said information below.
NUMBER OF BUILDINGS AND TOTAL SQUARE FEET IN THE US
According to the EIA, in 2012 there were 5.6 million commercial buildings in the US, up from 3.8 million in 1979 (when the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey was conducted). In the same period, the total space of commercial buildings increased from 51 billion square feet to 87 billion square feet.
Of these, 0.1% of buildings are larger than 500,000 square feet - meaning 5,600 buildings in the US are larger than 500,000 square feet. These buildings represent 8.1% of total floorspace - meaning that, combined, these 5,600 buildings concentrate 7.047 billion square feet.
COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS IN METRO AREAS IN THE US
In terms of geographical distribution, the South of the US is the region that concentrates the most commercial buildings - 40% of them are there. Next are the West and the Midwest, with 22% each, and the Northeast is the one with the lowest concentration, 16%.
The most attractive cities in the US for real estate investment (both residential and commercial) are Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco and Atlanta - with 24% of investors being most interested in commercial buildings.
According to Forbes, New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island topped the list of metro areas that received the most investment for new construction in 2015 - US$46.6 billion. Next up were Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (US$17.8 billion), Houston-Baytown-SugarLand (US$16.7 billion), Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana (US$11.7 billion) and Chicago-Naperville-Joliet (US$11.5 billion).
To wrap up, there are 5,600 commercial buildings larger than 500,000 square feet in the US, which combined amount to 7.047 billion square feet - of which almost half are located in the South.
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