Office Demand Growth Taps the Brakes

“We’d really need to see an increase in the labor force participation rate in order to see a significant boost in hiring,” Cross tells GlobeSt.com.

LOS ANGELES—Look for office fundamentals to continue improving nationally in 2018, albeit at a slower pace than the industry has seen since 2012. CBRE Group attributes the deceleration to both an increase in completions and a decrease in the number of office-using jobs that are expected to be created this year: about 212,000, or slightly more than half the annual average of 423,000 seen between 2010 and 2016.

The enactment of the $1.5-trillion tax reform package last month may not have much effect on that hiring pace. “Tax reform and also reduced regulation have certainly boosted business confidence, which is a positive for the broader economy and commercial real estate,” Andrea Cross, Americas head of office research at CBRE, tells GlobeSt.com. “For office specifically, we could see more hiring than we forecast as a result. But because the labor market is so tight, it’s more likely that we’re not going to see a huge increase over what we had projected.”