For Those Still Believing Workers Will Come Back In Droves, Forget it!

There area large group of folks, including most office building owners, landlord leasing agents, and older executive heads of thousands of companies, who still hold a belief that at some point in the not-to-distant future office workers will return to the office in force. This will be a combination of executive mandate, the recognition that if one truly wants to get promoted and/r get into upper management they must be seen in the office in person and not just on Zoom.  I believe that the office occupancy will increase from the current national average hovering around 50% of what it was pre-Covid, but it might not get much beyond that. Today’s headlines reinforce this. San Francisco Business Times May 30, 2023 “Google Seeks To Shed 1.4 M square feet across seven Silicon Valley offices”. “As we work to ensure that our real estate investments match the ds of our workforce, we’re ending leases for a number of unoccupied spaces,” a Google representative told the Business Times.” “In the first quarter, Alphabet (parent company of Google) recognized $64 million in expenses related to exiting leases.