To say the first three months of 2009 was a bad quarter for the Los Angeles County commercial office market is a vast understatement. Record-setting and not in a good way is a better description.

Roughly 2.48 million square feet of office space was put back on the market in the first quarter, the most since Grubb & Ellis Co. started tabulating quarterly county data in 1983.

To put that in perspective, it’s also more than double the 1 million square feet vacated in fourth quarter 2008, which at the time was a record.

After months of trying to squeak by without making big cuts, tenants in the 200 million-square-foot office market finally decided it was time to concede to the realities of the recession.

“A lot of companies here were hanging on longer and they finally realized it was time to give back space or consolidate,” said Jonathan Larsen, a Transwestern broker and tenant representation expert. “The last time I recall a market like this is probably in the 2001 time frame, and the one before that was probably in the early ’90s when it was, ‘Stay alive until ’95.'”

But actually it’s worse. And some submarkets were hit harder than others, particularly in higher-end areas on the Westside, which saw rents ramp up considerably during the boom hitting $6 per square foot in some areas.

“Those markets are the highest rent markets in L.A.,” said Whitley Collins, senior managing director of the L.A. region for brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “If you are going to trim expenses, those are markets that are going to suffer.”

Santa Monica gave back more than 229,000 square feet in the quarter and saw its vacancy rate rise by 3 points to 15 percent. And while Grubb & Ellis Co. data shows Class A asking rents dropping only 2 percent to $5.26 per square foot, Collins said that doesn’t reflect reality on the ground.

“The fact that asking rents haven’t come down as much doesn’t mean anything to me. I think rents are going to come down,” said Collins, adding that layoffs in the legal and entertainment fields key industries in Westside markets are a big part of the vacancy problem.

Indeed, the region gave back the most space of any market in the county. More than 665,000 square feet was vacated on the Westside in the first quarter and the vacancy rate rose nearly 2 full points to 12.8 percent.

Meanwhile, the recession pounded the investment sales market, drying up activity to a trickle. Larsen said that even opportunistic buyers are waiting on the sidelines because “no one wants to buy unless they think we are at the bottom of the market.”

However, one significant property was listed in the first quarter, and real estate professionals are tracking its potential sale as a bellwether. In January, Maguire Properties Inc. and partner Macquarie Office Trust put downtown’s One California Plaza on the market. In 2003, amid the boom, the L.A. office developer and landlord paid $225 million for the 42-story Bunker Hill building.

Collins said that if the building is sold it should go for a price that will set the market.

“That will be good, the market needs to establish that,” said Collins, adding that the building would be the first trophy office building sold in the “malaise.”

The county’s nearly 1 billion-square-foot industrial market didn’t escape the carnage. It had its first major contraction in response to the recession and it was massive.

After posting positive absorption as late as the fourth quarter of last year, the market gave back more than 3.9 million square feet in the first quarter. Because the industrial sector typically lags the rest of the real estate market, it could get worse, said Jeff Morgan, executive vice president at CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. and an industrial expert who heads the West Coast port logistics group.

“I don’t think that we have felt the full effect of the economic downturn,” Morgan said. “We aren’t quite a year from last summer when the housing market really tanked. I think we are early in the ballgame.”

The county industrial vacancy rate rose a half point to 2.7 percent since the fourth quarter as sales and leasing activity dropped by 16 percent. Meanwhile, the countywide asking rent dropped 4 cents to 53 cents per square foot.

“There are business failures, there is subleasing. Plans are being scaled back,” Morgan said. “All businesses are prudently going through cost-cutting.”

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