Now the growth is decelerating as office using jobs now have eclipsed prepandemic levels. I’ve mentioned that before that the office using job count is about 106% and of pre-pandemic and total jobs are about 90% of pre-pandemic. And the city’s forecast for the year, and we’ve always found the city’s forecast to be pretty spot on is only for very modest job losses in the first half of the year. I want to say somewhere in the order of 10,000 or 15,000 job losses in the first half of the year with about 5,000 of that made back up in the second half of the year. So I think our approach in terms of what we’re expecting, and I’ll let Steve speak a little bit more about what he’s seeing in the real is that certain sectors are belt tightening, certain other sectors continue to expand.
I think all businesses are still figuring their way as to how they’re going to be navigating and dealing with work from office, first remote work and encouraging to that we get above this 50%, 60% utilization rate back to 70%, 80%, which would be, in our opinion, full utilization. But the market is not setting up to be in our mind any measure of a major pullback in jobs or economic activity based on what we see. Steve, you want to address specifically some of Alex?
Steven Durels: Yes. I mean it’s all make a couple of points. One is with regards to technology guys. I think it’s important to recall that it’s not like in decades past where we had the tech rec where you had the dot-com boom where all those businesses went bust the guys that are — that have announced layoffs, these are mature technology businesses. So their businesses and the lease obligations that they have, those are secure rent payments. So they may not be adding bodies and they’re driving, therefore, driving additional leasing velocity, but it is still a very significant part of the overall New York City economy, which is the most diversified business economy in the United States right now. It’s not like the West Coast, which is a one-trick pony.
The secondly is that what we’re seeing generally from a leasing velocity standard, you saw — you referenced some of the brokers’ reports that you read. If you really get granular on those reports, October and November were the weakest parts of the fourth quarter. December showed a notable amount of leasing increase even though the overall quarter was down, there was a sort of starting to repair itself in December. And as you see from the announcement that we made yesterday, we obviously had some significant transactions that we are working on that end up closing the first couple of weeks of January. And as Mark referenced this earlier, even with all of that early day success on leasing of over 340,000 square feet in the first couple of weeks, we still have a very robust pipeline of about 700,000 square feet.
In that are several technology businesses, but also, like we saw all of last year, heavily weighted towards the fire sector. So between fire, tech and legal, those continue to be the big drivers. And I’ll make the last point, which is we continue to see sort of that smaller part of the market still coming back to life. We’ve got 9 leases out at the Grad bar building, which has always been a good barometer for me to show where the small space market is, and that’s an important part of our overall leasing success for the year.
Marc Holliday: So that was the entire market recap right there. And . Questions, Alex. We’re going to — we’re going to have to get going. We’re going to move on. But thanks for the question. Hopefully, that addresses some of the issues you inquired about.
