Office Demand Recovery Highest In Cities With New Jobs

According to the VTS Office Demand Index monthly report, there are two reasons why city’s may be seeing a quick downtown office recovery.

The first reason is that local employers are requiring their workers to come back into the office, and the second is that cities are seeing an uptick in job listings.

At the moment, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago are leading the nation in office recovery at 99%, 98% and 83% respectively. Additionally, Los Angeles and New York have nearly bounced back to the average demand they saw in 2018 and 2019.

However, cities with slow office recoveries, such as San Francisco, Boston and Washington D.C., are the ones that have among the highest number of remote-centric jobs.

“Employers are grappling with how to handle the future of work—do you make employees come back, offer hybrid opportunities or go fully remote?” said Nick Romito, CEO of Vts. “While it’s not our place to say that every company should bring their employees back into the office full-time, we can say that there is a clear distinction in recovery between cities depending on how remote-friendly their jobs are.”