Why DC Is Having A Hard Time Predicting Office Demand

Wei Xie

WASHINGTON, DC–In theory job growth is a reliable indicator for future office space demand. Unfortunately for the Washington DC area, this link is no longer so clear cut, at least for this particular cycle.

“We have had fairly robust job growth, but it is not translating very well into office demand growth,” CBRE Research Manager Wei Xie tells GlobeSt.com. The reason is clear: the area is still working through shadow vacancy. Also, Xie says, workplace strategies and design changes are still having an impact. For these reasons, she says, “it’s going to become more and more difficult to predict demand” using traditional metrics such as job numbers or job number projections.