NEW YORK CITY—As the office sector's recovery becomes broader-based, some markets nonetheless are pulling ahead of the rest. Those markets, says a report from Savills Studley, fall into two camps: those that offer the most specialized talent and those that provide substantially lower costs of doing business. “In many ways, this is a re-emergence of a familiar pattern, the segregation of site selection into knowledge/talent centers and lower-cost back office operations,” the report says.

The clear winners are neighborhoods such as SOMA in San Francisco and Silicon Alley in Manhattan, which have an edge in attracting millennials to urban cores. However, Savills Studley says the suburban corporate campus is “far from dead.” Consider the example of Google: while it has a significant presence in Silicon Alley through its ownership of 111 Eighth Ave., “the mothership is still in Mountain View, CA.”

Many suburban locations have been pursuing high-density development strategies as they compete for employers, development projects and residents, and Savills Studley notes that there have been success stories. “Top employers such as State Farm, ExxonMobil and Charles Schwab are anchoring the next set of 'urban suburbs,' ” according to the firm's third-quarter national office market report. “They are signing massive build-to-suits in mixed-use complexes with extensive new residential and retail product” in areas such as Atlanta's Central Perimeter, the Woodlands in Houston, the Dallas/Fort Worth suburbs in North Texas and Broomfield in Suburban Denver.