The Raleigh/Durham commercial real estate market is hot, and it owes much of its success to the tech boom of the past two decades, according to the Cushman & Wakefield report “Tech Cities 2.0.”

Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate services firm offering transactional and leasing guidance, explained that its list of Tech Cities — metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada with both the workforce and capital to sustain companies in the technology sector — generally have greater rents per square foot than those without such advantages.

Tech Cities saw higher growth in rent per square foot in the past 18 years than the U.S. average: The top 25 Tech Cities (which are not ranked) were up 59 percent to $316 per square foot, compared to the 26 percent growth seen by cities without heavy technology company presence.

In the Raleigh/Durham area, where the report indicates tech accounts for greater than 8 percent of all jobs— at companies such as IBM, Cree Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and SAS Institute — tech employment growth shot up nearly 30 percent between 2010 and 2017; the U.S. average during the same period was 16.4 percent.

Rent in Raleigh/Durham grew in tandem: Between 2010 and 2018, asking rents saw an increase of over 40 percent compared to the national average of 24.9 percent.

Tech leasing accounted for an estimated 10 percent of all leasing in the Raleigh/Durham market between 2017 and the second quarter of 2018, putting the area near the growth of New York, Washington and the greater Los Angeles area for the same category.

Raleigh/Durham saw $766.7 million in venture capital spending on tech firms from the third quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018 — compared to San Francisco’s nearly $34 billion in VC funding.

But with less than 2.5 percent of San Francisco’s VC funding, Raleigh-Durham surpassed San Francisco in office construction and deliveries measured as a percentage of total inventory at mid-year 2018.

Raleigh/Durham saw 5.6 percent office construction while San Francisco saw 5 percent.