In geographic and CAD applications as well as in VLSI design, the practical need for access methods that allow for efficient spatial searching has increased considerably. We show a performance comparison of the most promising spatial access methods, BR tree, R-tree, and R+-tree, through performance results from analytical study. For searching, BR tree produces the best performance with respect to the number of disk accesses since it generates the smallest number of nodes and avoids overlapping of rectangles. On the other hand, R+-tree gives the smallest number of false drops because it avoids overlapping of rectangles unlike R-tree and contains more reduced empty space than BR tree. Furthermore, the experimental results are relatively similar to the results from the analytical study.