The best deal on Wall Street might be its office space. Asking rents for buildings at the one-time mecca of global finance have fallen to among the lowest in Manhattan after ranking as some of the priciest as recently as 2008. Wall Street landlords are seeking rates about 18% less than the city average, hurt by years of exodus by financial firms looking for bigger, more modern offices, according to brokerage Studley.

The six-block lower Manhattan street is now home to residences, architects, engineers and media companies along with the securities firms that long dominated the area because of its proximity to the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad. The planned purchase of the exchange?s parent by Germany ?s Deutsche Boerse would be the latest evolution as the street?s anchor comes under foreign ownership.

?As far as the Wall Street cachet, I think it?s nice, but I don?t think it?s what it was 20 to 25 years ago,? said Marc Shapses, an executive managing director at Studley and a downtown leasing broker for two and a half decades. ?Between technology and everything else, I don?t think people need to be right by the exchange anymore.?

The commercial history of Wall Street ? so-named because of the wall that protected the northern end of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam ? began at the East River end of the street, where merchants and traders gathered by the docks, said Carol Willis, director of New York?s Skyscraper Museum. The museum?s The Rise of Wall Street exhibit closed in January.

Those merchants? gatherings at Wall and Water streets in the 1790s would evolve into the Buttonwood Agreement, named for a tree where stock brokers would meet to do business. The NYSE traces its history to that pact.

By 1850, ?the Wall Street of business and finance would be established in stone,? Willis said.

A century and a half later, the lure of the stock exchange has receded. At the end of February, asking office rents on Wall Street were about $36.51 a square foot, compared with the average of $38.56 for all of downtown and $44.74 for the city, according to New York-based Studley, which represents tenants. Were the street its own submarket, only four of 20 Manhattan areas would rank lower for rents, the firm?s data show.

It would have been seventh-highest as recently as the second quarter of 2008.

?What you?re talking about is really symptomatic of the whole downtown market,? said Ruth Colp-Haber, founding partner of Wharton Property Advisors, a brokerage firm that represents Manhattan office tenants. ?Very rarely do I hear a firm that wants a Wall Street address.?

Demand for downtown space, like in much of the city, froze after the global credit crisis and plunge in financial-industry jobs. Wall Street was hurt by two additional factors: Goldman Sachs Group?s decision to sublease space at a building a block south, and departures at Donald Trump ?s 40 Wall St, the biggest multitenant tower on the street, according to Shapses.

Goldman Sachs subleased 600,000 square feet (55,740 square meters) of space it rented and never used at 77 Water St, a 26- story tower built in the late 1960s, Shapses said.

The bank sought rents lower than the area?s average, which pressured nearby landlords to reduce their asking rates, particularly at older buildings like those on Wall Street, he said. At 40 Wall, American Express vacated about 240,000 square feet, mostly on floors 16 to 22, said Brad Gerla, executive vice president at CB Richard Ellis Group, which represents the tower. Law firm Herzfeld & Rubin PC also departed, leaving 67,000 square feet.

The building represents about 1.3 million of Wall Street?s 8.5 million square feet of offices, so what happens there tends to affect the street?s overall rents, Shapses said.

The property was 31% vacant as of last month, according to CoStar Group, a Washington-based real estate data service. Wall Street had an office vacancy rate of 15.9% at the end of February, higher than downtown?s overall rate of 10.7%, Studley data show.