As working remotely remains the norm for many, vacated office space continues to vex real estate players. According to senior partners Daniele Chiarella and Aditya Sanghvi and colleagues, over the past three years a net 125 million square feet of office space became available in the United States and United Kingdom combined. To help get workers out of their pj’s and into offices, real estate owners and operators can consider partnering with employers to understand how they want their employees to use the workplace.
Image description: A pair of bar graphs showing the measure of leased and not leased office space between 2007 and 2021 for both the United Kingdom and the United States on the same vertical scale for comparison. The United States shows over 40 million square feet of unleased office space back in 2009 after the banking crisis, and then picks up, peaking at about 90 million square feet of office space leased in 2015. It then heads sharply into negative territory again during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, peaking at about 70 million square feet of unleased office space in 2020 before gradually recovering by 2022, although still not into positive territory. As the the same scale is used, it is clear that the United States has much more available office space to let than the United Kingdom does, but other than that scale difference, both follow a similar trajectory, with their being unleased space in the United Kingdom from 2020 onward, as well. End of image description
To read the article, see “Six new imperatives for real estate players,” March 7, 2023.