Trading up: companies are finding great values in a recovering office market.

• Author: Coon, John
• Position: Business Trends

A new chapter will begin for the MultiLing Corporation this summer when it fully moves into new office space in the Zions Bank Financial Center in downtown Prove. The move seems hardly worth the trouble on the surface: MultiLing is set to relocate approximately one block further north on University Avenue from where its current offices are located in the Wells Fargo building.

Distances can be deceiving. Although MultiLing will be within walking distance of its old offices, the new offices will be worlds apart in what they offer to the document translation company.

Two full floors of space will be available to MultiLing once it finishes moving to its new location. The current offices provide a single floor, and continued growth caused the company to simply run out of room. Since 2006, the number of MultiLing employees has increased by 125 percent.

"Were growing as a business, so we also need to grow physically," says Emmanuel Margetic, vice president of marketing for MultiLing. "We will need to hire more people as well. Since this building was offering a limited amount of space for our growth, we've pretty much maxed the growth potential that this building had to offer. So we decided to move to the Zions building."

MultiLing is not alone among Utah companies in undergoing corporate relocation. An influx of commercial real estate development along the Wasatch Front coupled with lower costs associated with relocation have many companies packing up moving boxes and scouting out new office space in an effort to create more room to grow their business.

Golden Opportunities

Commercial real estate brokerage firm NAI West notes that key numbers are up across the board. A net 590,562 square feet of office space was absorbed in Salt Lake County during 2011, after two years of negative absorption rates, according to NAI 'West's 2011 year-end report on the commercial market. The number of new leases rose 25 percent from 2010 levels to 339, and a total of 2,558,811 square feet is under lease--a 21 percent increase over the previous year.

Much of this had to do with lower costs associated with securing leases and moving into office space. The overall vacancy rate was 13.71 percent, a 1.5 percent decline from 2010. For Class A office space, the vacancy rate was at 8.72 percent. That represents a drop in seven points from where it was in 2007. Overall asking rates for available office space have dropped 7.3 percent over a three-year period, with Class A...