Hybrid working will push US office vacancies 55 per cent above their pre-pandemic levels to a record 1.1bn square feet by 2030, according to a stark industry forecast that attempts to quantify the damage to the commercial property sector wrought by changing work patterns.
The report by commercial real estate adviser Cushman & Wakefield found that 330mn sq ft of office space — roughly equivalent to all the office inventory in the Washington metropolitan area — would be made redundant by hybrid or remote working by the end of the decade. That would come on top of another 740mn sq ft of space that it classified as “normal or natural” vacancy.
Cushman concluded that roughly a quarter of US office space was already undesirable and another 60 per cent was at risk of obsolescence and might require “significant investment” either to upgrade or repurpose it for other uses — a transformation that New York City is now beginning to embrace. While such trends are most acute in North America, they are also evident in Europe and Asia, the company noted.