COVID, Masks, School Closings Dent Positive RTO Trends
Q3 2023 office visits remained 3% higher than in Q2 2023 — and the highest this year, according to Placer.ai.
September was kind of an “office half-empty” or an “office half-full” situation for many offices, according to Placer.ai’s Nationwide Office Building Index.
Over the summer, returns to office (RTO) began to increase on a year-over-year (YoY) basis, with nationwide office visits in August just 35.3% lower than in August 2019 — and the highest they’ve been since February 2020.
But September saw a renewed widening of the year-over-four-year (Yo4Y) visit gap, to 40.7%, perhaps due in part to the recent rise in COVID cases, according to the report.
Placer.ai cited masking making a comeback and school closings due to respiratory illness among students and staff that put many employees in elevated work-from-home situations.
Year over year, office foot traffic continued to increase, “but more slowly than it has in recent months — although the smaller YoY increase can also be due to the fewer business days in September 2023 compared to September 2022,” Placer.ai noted.
Altogether, Q3 2023 visits remained 3% higher than they were in Q2 2023 — and the highest they’ve been this year.
Jonathan Mazur, Newmark’s executive managing director of National Research, tells GlobeSt.com, “It’s been said that if a company has a hybrid schedule for its employees — in-office occupancy of three days or more per week — it requires the same amount of space as a full-time in-office structure. I don’t think that has changed.
“More companies are encouraging employees to return to the office, as well as return more frequently, and they are taking a hard(er)-lined approach to adhere to company occupancy policies as corporate executives understand that in-person collaboration is better for training, for culture and ultimately for the bottom line,” he added.