After an active July with 5.17 million square feet leased, office leasing hit the doldrums in August, with transactions dropping an astounding 68.2 percent, to just 1.56 million square-feet of inked deals.

A new report from Colliers International says August leasing was 30.8 percent less than just a year ago. Still, so far this year, 26.98 million square feet has been leased.

Michael Cohen of Colliers observed, “July was a bang-up month and August not so much.” But now phones are ringing again, he says, as executives are back from vacations.

Cohen is among many who are waiting for the tech giants including Amazon, Facebook and Apple to officially land and sign megaleases.

That’s one reason Colliers’ Franklin Wallach, a senior managing director of research, says, “2019 should be a very strong year and 2018, with 42 million square feet leased, was the highest since 2001.”