Office occupancy losses hit record lows in 2020. A new report from JLL calls the occupancy decline unprecedented with 84 million square feet in occupancy declines for the year. In the fourth quarter alone, occupancy losses totaled 40 million square feet.

More than half of the occupancy declines happened in CBD markets, and within CBDs, occupancy declines were greatest among commodity product. Class-B office buildings, for example, had occupancy decreases one-and-a-half times faster than class-A and trophy assets. Gateway markets have led the occupancy losses. Nearly 30 million square feet of give-backs occurred in New York and San Francisco. This is 2.2 times the national rate of national occupancy losses.

Negative net absorption followed a similar trend. Expensive markets with a high concentration of tech-and energy-companies, including Seattle, Boston, New Jersey and Los Angeles, had the largest decline in office absorption, according to the research from JLL. The occupancy losses pushed the vacancy rate up to 17.1% nationally. In CBD markets, the vacancy rate increased twice as fast as the national rate.

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland is a freelance journalist and magazine writer based in Los Angeles, California. For more than 5 years, she has extensively reported on the commercial real estate industry, covering major deals across all commercial asset classes, investment strategy and capital markets trends, market commentary, economic trends and new technologies disrupting and revolutionizing the industry. Her work appears daily on GlobeSt.com and regularly in Real Estate Forum Magazine. As a magazine writer, she covers lifestyle and travel trends. Her work has appeared in Angeleno, Los Angeles Magazine, Travel and Leisure and more.