Where Transit Goes, Office Tenants Follow

“There has been a seismic shift in workforce preferences to urban areas,” says JLL’s Scott Homa.

WASHINGTON, DC—There are a couple of clear correlations between submarket office fundamentals and transit accessibility. One is that vacancies tend to be lower—by an average of 370 basis points—and asking rents higher in these neighborhoods, and another is that new construction is concentrated in areas where mass transit is either available or is slated for delivery.

Take the suburbs of Washington, DC, where Scott Homa, US director of office research at JLL, is based. The Metro rail and bus system’s Silver Line Corridor in Northern Virginia, stretching from Tysons Corner to Dulles Airport, is seeing 2.1 million square feet of development, largely near existing or in-progress stations, according to a new JLL report.