This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Summer typically brings a seasonal slowdown in the business of finding and renting office space.

But not summer 2015 in Salt Lake County, according to a new report from Cushman & Wakefield | Commerce.

The Salt Lake City-based real-estate firm notes that office leasing and sales activity in Utah's most populous county saw an uncharacteristic surge through July, August and September.

Utah's humming economy, business-friendly demographics and a spate of new transit-oriented developments are big drivers in that demand, analysts said.

Instead of taking it easy, office tenants seeking to expand seemed to shop the market with a new sense of urgency during the summer, according to Mike Richmond, executive director at Cushman & Wakefield|Commerce.

"Folks knew that if they waited," Richmond said, "the space they were interested in would be leased by somebody else."

Office vacancy rates are hovering at about 10.1 percent.

Also telling: Demand is coming in large chunks, Richmond said, with some tenants seeking large square footages of additional office space.

Heightened demand and limited office-space inventories are likely to keep activity high through year's end, according to the report. That's true, even with nearly 1,763,922 square feet of new office space currently under construction across the county.

While the bump in market activity shows up countywide, the firm's market snapshot singled out Fort Union as "one of the most competitive geographic areas in the Salt Lake valley."

Transit-oriented development projects, or TODs, are adding more fuel to the trend, judging from recent deals.

View 72 in Midvale and Vista Station in Draper — the first built next to a TRAX station, the later, adjacent to a FrontRunner stop — "have seen an explosive amount of growth over the last six months alone," said Trigger Reital, a managing director and office building expert with the firm.

"In recent years," Reital said, "we have seen when a TOD is built, tenants come flocking in droves."

Tony Semerad