My last column was upbeat and generally optimistic about the prospects for commercial real estate in the new year and short-term future. I did mention the continuing electrical rate crisis as a problem that needs to be dealt with, but I cited a new City Council, the bustling redevelopment of East Village and additional office space inventory coming on-line in the next few years as reasons for my good feelings about San Diego’s future.

Since then, however, I’ve talked to more than a few business owners and other operatives who say they are increasingly concerned about whether our economy will continue to enjoy good health, locally and nationally. One person was so forlorn that he predicted outright that if economic indicators even began to show a continuing downturn, he would not survive, much less continue to prosper.

I asked him and others what the specific basis was for their doom and gloom and heard what I suspected. It wasn’t their particular business enterprise or industry that was troubling them. No, they were concerned about the “collapse” of some of the high-technology players and the devastating impact the “excesses of the dot-coms” would have on the region’s overall economy.

While I don’t regard the failure of any business lightly, especially if it portends a collapse of an entire sector of our local economy, I do urge one and all to keep things in proper context. In economic forecasting, there is often a wide gap between perception and truth that gives undue credibility to the chicken littles and other doomsayers with whom we come into contact. Listen to these folks long enough and many people will stray from the very behaviors that made them prosperous and begin to behave in ways that will result in those disastrous prophesies come to pass. It’s almost hypnotic how rumors and so-called factual reports of bad times a-coming can influence the future.

The fact is, the new year and the foreseeable future brings tremendous opportunities for those who lease office space to conduct their business throughout the San Diego metropolitan area. This year, in fact, will be the year of the tenant. Let’s take a look at a couple of reasons why this is so.

First of all, there is going to be a great deal of “second-generation” office space coming on-line. Some companies will be vacating their original spaces to expand into new spaces, while others — because of corporate mergers or reorganizations — will be consolidating their space needs into fewer and smaller office quarters, thereby freeing up and subleasing their excess space to others. And of course, there are and will continue to be companies that do suffer economic misfortunes that require them to default on their leases. The net effect of these situations will be a growing inventory of office space that will need to be subleased — enough to keep landlords and their brokers mindful of the fact that the office space market is once again competitive. That’s good news to those looking for office space this year.

The newly available sublease space is located pretty much throughout the metropolitan area, mostly in Sorrento Mesa, UTC and Carlsbad where there has been significant construction to create tenant mobility.

At the same time, San Diego has become a new or bigger home to many national and international heavyweights — Sun Microsystems, Sony, Intel, BAE Systems, Cisco, Pfizer, Merck and Siemens to name but a few. These players not only are taking considerable space themselves but they undoubtedly will attract other companies that are increasingly eager to relocate here from such locations as San Francisco, Boston, New York and even Seattle where housing prices are off the charts. We complain about high housing costs here, but San Diego County housing pales in comparison to these and other locales.

Finally, even those who have office space in downtown San Diego where vacant class A office space is as rare as a 3-cent stamp have cause to be optimistic. The two new Santa Fe Place office towers planned for the foot of Broadway will add more than 830,000 square feet of new office space to the downtown inventory.

Rumor has it that Charles Schwab is considering leasing as much as 250,000 square feet of that complex. If true, Schwab would not only set a new standard for a leasehold size — second only to Sempra Energy — but its presence at that level would certainly attract other world-class companies to consider major operations in San Diego. The trickle-down effect of such major players coming to San Diego is impossible to exaggerate.

In light of these and many other positive conditions, it becomes hard not to be optimistic. Indeed, 2001 will be the year of the tenant.