When MyInsuranceExpert.com announced last week it is moving its headquarters and 85 workers from Troy to one of the downtown Detroit office buildings bought by entrepreneur Dan Gilbert, the online life insurance brokerage firm joined a growing trend.
And most of downtown Detroit's gain is amounting to some pain for the suburban office market.

The employee relocations of major companies such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Gilbert's Quicken Loans Inc. and DTE Energy eventually will leave a hole of empty office space in suburbia that's bigger than Comerica Park. About 9,700 workers will leave the suburbs, creating an estimated 871,000 square feet of empty space.


"I can't recall such a situation like this in my career when the momentum is clearly in favor" of downtown Detroit, said John DeGroot, vice president of research in the Southfield office of Grubb & Ellis Co., a commercial real estate advisory firm. "It's too soon, really, to say how long the impact will be other than to say that the central business district is going be much more competitive with the suburbs. And that's really not a bad thing."
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The vacancy rate of Detroit's suburbs has increased almost 2 percentage points to 25.1 percent during the past two years; downtown Detroit's rate, meanwhile, has stabilized at 31.4 percent, according to Grubb & Ellis. But the impact of recently announced office shuffling has not been entirely absorbed, because thousands of workers still haven't actually made the move downtown, DeGroot said.
When they do, office vacancy rates in such markets as Southfield and Troy could hit levels neither community is used to seeing, DeGroot said


From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110829/...#ixzz1Wl7dAVQt