Can we count on the money men? Goldman, AIG, Merrill all examining office needs.

Goldman Sachs occupies a huge office footprint downtown and its plans to pull up stakes at numerous locations and consolidate has been described by real estate experts as an impending blow to the office neighborhood there.

But brokers familiar with the firm's real estate decision making also note that it has often been filled with unexpected turns that have some wondering if the dire predictions have been premature.

In recent weeks for instance, Goldman unexpectedly pulled a sizeable block of space it had long been marketing for sublease at One New York Plaza so that it can use the offices for its operations.

The move, which appears to coincide with a succession of profitable quarters for Goldman, has already begun to stoke some speculation among brokers that perhaps the firm's run of success has pushed it back in a direction of growth.

Goldman is planning to bring most of its offices in Lower Manhattan into a new tower it is nearly finished developing just north of the World Trade Center site on the corner of West and Vesey Streets.

By bringing its operations into the new, state of the art facility, many real estate experts anticipate Goldman will leave large offices behind in a handful of office buildings downtown.

Compounded with vacancies that are expected to result from the letting of square footage being done by other sizeable tenants in the area, most notably AIG and Merrill Lynch, the openings come at a time when Lower Manhattan's office market seems hardly able to afford them.

Yet another round of delays at the World Trade Center site has taken some of the luster out of the district's resurgence as a central commercial hub after the attacks of 9/11.

And amid the recession and a meltdown in the real estate market, rental rates have fallen sharply across the city. The problems in the office market have been felt particularly hard downtown as landlords have had to slash rates even deeper to discount their space below the bargains that can be found in midtown, a district that has long enjoyed a leg up over Lower Manhattan in prestige and convenience for many tenants.

Whether or not Goldman is actually yet adding employees to bulk up its operations, brokers say that the move at One Liberty could be indicative that it is at least anticipating continued strong earnings and planning for the additional office facilities that performance may entail.

With so much space in its portfolio downtown, that may not mean new leases anytime soon. But brokers say the firm could also become increasingly loath to relinquish offices it had been previously planning to release and that many feared would weigh heavily on the downtown market.

But predicting Goldman's real estate maneuvers has also been tricky business.

The financial firm finished building a towering 42-story, 1.5 million square foot skyscraper across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan in Jersey City at 30 Hudson Street in 2003.

With plans once to develop the area into a large complex for its operations, Goldman instead has left large tracts of vacancy in the tower after equity traders and other moneymaking personnel the firm had planned to relocate expressed gripes at having to leave downtown for New Jersey.

Published reports in 2007 indicated that Goldman occupied only about 60 percent of 30 Hudson, at the height of an economic boom when it was earning record profits and it had perhaps the most incentive to backfill employees within its own space because office rents were charging to record peaks.

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One broker familiar with the office market in Lower Manhattan said that the decision to fill some or all of the roughly 260,000 square feet Goldman just pulled at One Liberty could stem from similar resistance among producers at the firm.

The unpopularity of the Jersey tower within the firm hasn't been the only impetus that has prompted it to abruptly reconsider previous decisions.

Goldman arranged a long term net lease of 77 Water Street, a roughly 600,000 square foot downtown office building, from the real estate development firm the Kaufman Organization in the late 1990s. But Goldman Sachs never moved into the tower, even though its deal ends on two far off expiration dates, in 2018 for one section of the building and in 2021 for the remainder of the space according to a person familiar with that deal.

More recently, the firm has been aggressively trying to sublease that space, which a source said the firm hasn't been as interested in backfilling because it has newer office facilities elsewhere.

The firm also agreed to a deal in the late 1990s with the real estate investor Steven Witkoff to lease all of 10 Hanover Square, an office building that Witkoff was arranging to convert into a residential property. Five years later, in 2003, the firm exercised an early termination it had structured into that deal. But the move came at a price. In a quarterly earnings statement that year, Goldman listed the deal as the largest expense in a $97 million charge it said it had incurred reducing its office space.

A broker familiar with the termination said that Goldman Sachs had to compensate Witkoff, at least in part, for work he had completed on the residential conversion prior to his deal with Goldman and then had scrapped to maintain the building as an office tower so that Goldman could move in. Witkoff subsequently completed the conversion after Goldman left.

Other sizeable blocks of office space Goldman Sachs occupies include One New York Plaza, where it has about 675,000 square feet and 85 Broad Street, a 1.1 million square foot building owned by MetLife that Goldman leases entirely in a deal commitment set to expire in 2011.

At 180 Maiden Lane, Goldman occupies 800,000 square feet with options to extend the commitment for the space a decade or more. Earlier this year it arranged to sell that leasehold to AIG, which is planning to relocate much of its operations into the building from other locations it occupies downtown at 70 Pine Street and 72 Wall Street.