County Market Is Stabilizing, Analysis Shows : Real estate: Tenants lease an additional 100,000 square feet of office space. But commercial vacancy rates remain high.

After several years of mounting vacancies, commercial real estate markets in Ventura County appear to have stabilized, giving some business forecasters hope that the county may soon pull out of the recession, real estate officials said Wednesday.

But commercial vacancy rates remain painfully high throughout Ventura County, said officials with Grubb & Ellis Co. in the company’s latest biannual analysis of real estate trends.

“It’s hard to say if we’ve hit bottom, because you never know where the bottom is until you’re past it,” said Michael Blahosky of the company’s investment division.

Hopeful signs emerged this spring when tenants leased an additional 100,000 square feet of office space in the county, officials said. The leasing splurge dropped the office vacancy rate to 22.7% during the months of April, May and June. That was down from a rate of 24.4% for the same period last year and 25% for the spring quarter in 1991, officials said.

Eastern Ventura County accounted for nearly all of the increase in new office leases, with 45,000 square feet of space leased in Moorpark and another 45,000 in Westlake by a variety of tenants, officials said.

Industrial building vacancies held steady at 12.5%, with Newbury Park registering the highest rate of empty space in the county at 22%, officials said.

Despite a mini-building boom of retail shopping centers, the vacancy rate remained firm at 9.5%, officials said. Five shopping centers are under construction, including a Shopping at the Rose in Oxnard and the Mission Bell Plaza in Moorpark, officials said.

Grubb & Ellis predicts that these new centers will draw new tenants into the county rather than prompting existing stores to change locations.

The recession has forced most building owners to lower rents and greatly reduced the value of some property. Grubb & Ellis said the price tag on office buildings now has plunged 60% on average and the average shopping center has declined in value by 50% since the 1989 peak in real estate prices.

Of eight shopping centers built in 1989, most have been repossessed by lenders, said Pamela Scott of the company’s retail properties division.

“The opportunities for investment right now are tremendous,” said William S. Fedde of the company’s office properties division.

One downside to the decline in real estate prices is that rents in the best Los Angeles high rise office buildings having fallen to levels only slightly above Ventura County prices, Fedde said. He said the bargains in Los Angeles have slowed businesses moving to the county from the metropolitan area.

But Fedde forecast that demand for office space will rebound gradually. “I don’t think it’s ever coming back as fast and hard as it was in the 80s,” Fedde said. “We hope it doesn’t. It probably wasn’t healthy.”

Dirk Kittredge, the company’s research director, said some bright spots remain in Ventura County. He said many people are attracted to a high quality of life in the county and government leaders increasingly are viewed as receptive to business.

Kittredge believes that the worst of the recession is over. “It seems like the wash has been done and now we’re cleaning up,” he said.