Office demand rebounds to highest level since Covid pandemic began
Office demand has rebounded to its highest level since the onset of the Covid pandemic, despite a 2% decline in office-using employment from 2022. The national office vacancy rate has decreased to 22.2%, with significant variations in demand across different cities. Major markets like San Francisco and New York City are experiencing growth, while others like Boston and Seattle are seeing declines.
- ▪The national office vacancy rate fell to 22.2% in the first quarter of this year.
- ▪San Francisco and New York City are leading in office demand due to rising AI tech employment and diverse job markets.
- ▪Cities like Boston and Seattle are experiencing weaker demand due to lack of strong employment growth.
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| Original publisher | CNBC |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/28/office-demand-real-estate.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:30:01 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T12:34:31.921Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T12:34:31.921Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9mQLGHk4xJG1 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The surge in demand is curious, given that office-using employment is still down 2% from 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Usually, that would result in less office demand, but the drop in employment could also be giving employers more leverage to get workers back into the office.Nationally, for all buildings, the office vacancy rate fell 14 basis points to 22.2% in the first quarter of this year from the previous quarter and is down 30 basis points from the last peak in Q2 2025, according to a report from JLL, a commercial real estate services and investment management company.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNBC.
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