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It’s 2010, and you’re walking through the Des Moines skywalks. It’s quiet. Too quiet. You realize that you could fire a cannon without hitting anybody, which is a nice reward after years of dragging that heavy cannon around. You head up to the Kaleidoscope food court, and there’s absolutely no waiting line at any of the vendors. (Except at Subway, of course. The U.S. economy could collapse, we could all be living in Warren Buffett’s basement, and there still would be a long, winding line at Subway.)

Then you hear it: a low, mournful echo. It’s the cavernous sound of vacant office space.

The recent market survey done for CB Richard Ellis/Hubbell Commercial sees 850,000 to 1 million square feet of competitive office space being vacated in the central business district during the next 36 months. That’s out of the current total of 4.1 million square feet.

And in West Des Moines – which, you may have noticed, occasionally has some slight influence on the fortunes of downtown Des Moines – 500,000 square feet of office space will be added or vacated this year.

The copy machines have yet to be unplugged, but the scramble to fill all that space up again has already begun. “Right now, we’re primarily talking with landlords about strategy for leasing the space as it becomes available in the future,” said Kyle Gamble, managing director at Hubbell Commercial. “How to position the building, what amenities to offer, maybe some improvement of the facility to make it more attractive, where to position it from a pricing standpoint.”

Then there’s the issue of parking, said Hubbell broker Heath Bullock, and “how tenant improvements are handled, the best way to break up floors for smaller tenants” and so forth.

In recent years, big companies have occupied a chunk of downtown space here and another chunk there, but that gets tiresome, apparently. As soon as they have enough cash in their checking account, they construct a building, or a campus, all for themselves.

Bullock noted at the recent survey unveiling that owner-occupied office space is on the verge of surpassing competitive space in the Greater Des Moines market.

“Corporations make long-term commitments by owning real estate, and that’s a great aspect of the Des Moines market,” Bullock said. The downside, of course, is that we have all this competitive office space, and not all of it can be made into apartments and condos. Besides, downtown residences are supposed to be for people who work for downtown companies.

“In the short term, competitive space suffers a little bit” when companies stretch out in their own digs, Bullock said, “but that’s just the phase we’re in. There’s going to be a rebound.”

Finding lots of small and medium-sized tenants would be one way to recharge the downtown battery, but an agonizingly slow one.

“Our charge is to find large entities that need large blocks of space,” Bullock said. “If you look at almost every major office asset downtown, it has had one occupant take up the majority of the building.” For example: the Hub Tower, the Ruan Center and the Liberty Building before it turned into residential condos. “Historically, you find large users,” he said. “Otherwise your absorption time is a lot longer.”

Bill Wright, managing director of transaction services at Terrus Real Estate Services, said, “We’re going to continue to see incentives provided by landlords – some pretty aggressive lease packages, rent abatement, maybe some tenant improvement packages.”

Combine nice financial deals with the city’s steadily improving image, and you like to think that an adequate supply of lessees must exist out there somewhere.

One problem to be solved in all of this is the Younkers building, whose asking price recently was slashed. Will it become part of the office space mix?

Hubbell doesn’t think of the old landmark as “logical office property,” according to Gamble.

Wright disagrees. “It could be an office component,” he said. “Because it has such a large floor plate, office probably does make some sense. The timing is questionable, because of all the other space coming on the market” but it does have a fine location and skywalk connections.

And at its bargain-basement price of $2.45 million – hey, it’s less than the price of a small jet or a decent yacht – “I do think someone’s going to take a run at it,” Wright said.