CHICAGO—Craig Robinson of Cassidy Turley kicked off a session on corporate real estate at yesterday's SIOR conference here with a sobering statistic. In the past, growth in the number of office jobs would roughly coincide with increased demand from office users. But since the economy began adding office jobs a few years ago, corporations have remained determined to shrink footprints by reconfiguring offices into more collaborative layouts, among other strategies, keeping net absorption below the historical norm. Robinson asked his fellow panelists if they could find a silver lining in all these numbers. At first, as they spoke about their corporate clients, it was not easy.

“They still have 20% more space than they need,” said Martha O'Mara, a co-founder and managing director of Corporate Portfolio Analytics, a real estate advisory firm in Cambridge, MA, and this should keep the overall market from returning to the days when job growth and net absorption were closely linked. “It doesn't mean every market is going to be like that,” but the office sector in general is unlikely to see the return of boom times.

“Most of the corporate clients I speak and work with are shedding space,” said Sarah Bagby, the Richmond-based vice president and real estate leader at Genworth Financial. “[Real estate] gets looked at with a very critical eye,” she added. However, instead of causing a narrow focus on cost per square-foot, squeezing employees into a smaller footprint has many clients focusing on the value they get per square-foot.