Given the woes on Wall Street and the billions upon billions in write-downs financial-services firms are facing, it would seem like a fine time for the financial sector to vacate some office space—or so one might think.

But movement on the financial front has been almost eerily quiet in the real estate world. Few major firms are taking space anywhere—that much has been expected—but the banks also seem reluctant to put any office space up for grabs through subleasing.

People familiar with talks say that JPMorgan Chase is close to shedding five floors at Rudin Management’s 345 Park Avenue, where rents are likely to reach well over $100 a foot, though spokespeople for both JPMorgan and Rudin declined to comment. And Citigroup has declined to renew a few leases around town, but generally, such moves by the financial industry are hard to find.

The probable reason, brokers and other real estate processionals say, is that conditions are not yet quite horrid enough. In the past, financial firms have shed office space at times of economic downturns, only to turn around and need more space just a year or two later as conditions improved. In a time of high rents and low vacancy, doing that this time could be extremely expensive for the banks.

“They dump it low and then they buy it back high, and there’s always a gap in between until they can get back up to speed, and that costs them inordinate amounts of money,” CB Richard Ellis’ global brokerage chairman, Stephen Siegel, said. “I think they’re just going to be a little bit more careful—they have to carry it a little bit, not write it off, and then they know their business is going to build back up.”

Layoffs have also not come en masse as of yet, though that’s not to say they won’t come; but many in real estate still suggest that it will take a lot of layoffs—well over 50,000 involving office-based jobs—for firms to start shedding significant space.

“We’re going to need to have several quarters of an economic recession in order for these firms to give back significant chunks of space—that’s how much competition there is right now for space,” said Dan Fasulo, a managing director at Real Capital Analytics.