During a webinar predicting office performance in 2022, Julie Whelan, global head of occupier thought leadership at CBRE, was optimistic. This year, she expects people to continue to return to the office and tenant demand to steadily return. She was also realistic, noting the potential for Omicron to keep employees home and predicting rising vacancy rates through the first half of the year. Overall, office is slowly recovering, but 2022 will remain a tenant's market.

"We do believe the office market is going to continue to improve in 2022. That outlook is really dependent on employees coming back into the office more than they are today," said Whelan.

The biggest factor that could stop the return to the office is the emergence of new variants. In the fall, office-reopening plans we halted by the Delta variant, and now Omircon is having a similar effect. Still, Whelan doesn't expect the variant to sour leasing activity long-term. "We know that Omicron is a factor to think about today, but even with the variant, our best educated guess is that physical office occupancy—meaning people frequenting offices—is going to slowly edge up in 2022," she said. "We think that it will be muted in the first quarter as a result of Omicron."