Outsourcing of information technology jobs, which is likely to continue to countries like India, has had an unexpected result -- less demand for office space in the US and consequent slowing of American commercial real estate recovery, a media report said.

Outsourcing and India: Complete Coverage

Big companies -- from Intel Corp to Motorola Inc to International Business Machines Corp -- have been moving jobs abroad, and the trend is expected to continue, The Wall Street Journal said.

The moves, coupled with still high national office vacancy rates, have kept outsourcing a hot topic of numerous real estate conferences and the subject of a flurry of research papers.

Research firm Reis Inc expects absorption of space to fall from 26 per cent from its peak to an average 68.7 million square feet over the next three years, "partly" due to outsourcing, the paper said.

Last month, Forrester Research Inc of Cambridge, Massachusetts, revised upward its previous forecast for the number of white-collar jobs that would be shifted offshore by 2015 to 3.4 million from 3.3 million.

Around the same time, a survey by Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle Inc quoted 80 per cent of real estate executives for major companies as saying they are likely to increase their offshore call centres and computer services over the next five years.

Dale Anne Reiss, global director of real estate at Ernst & Young, said: "There is a clear impact on the real estate sector from the offshoring trend."

Using Forrester's earlier forecast, Reiss calculated that demand for about 50 million square feet of office space a year will be lost as jobs move overseas.